Hit Man is not really about a hit man. It’s about a guy who pretends to be one to lure potential perps into showing their hand. He’s whatever the male version of the honey trap is, and in this fictionalised retelling of the story of real-life dude Gary Johnson he is played by Glen Powell.
The film is based on an article in Texas Monthly by Skip Hollandsworth. This is a good thing, since a Texas Monthly article by Hollandsworth also provided the basis of Bernie, a weird comedy of sorts starring Jack Black as a much-loved member of a smalltown community who also happened to be a real-life serial killer. Both films were directed by Richard Linklater.
When we meet Gary he is not a self-assured “hit man” for hire. Rather, he’s a dweeb college lecturer with flat side-parted hair and sauce-bottle shoulders. He has a steady life in the burbs, where he mists his plants and feeds the cats and birds. As a side hustle he’s part of a team that takes down would-be hirers of professional killers – if this seems weird to you, as it did to me, this is all from real life. But Gary’s life takes a lurch out of his comfort zone when he is asked to step up when usual fake hit man Jasper can’t do the job. So instead of hiding away in the van with Phil (Sanjay Rao) and Claudette (Retta), listening in on the conversation as Jasper guides his target towards incrimination, self-conscious Gary is out there pretending to be Ron, a real-life, slickly confident killer for hire.
He turns out to be quite good at it, and in a plot twist that feels lifted from a Billy Wilder comedy (and is not really true) has soon fallen for a potential client, the sort of super-hottie (played by Adria Arjona) Ron might plausibly get somewhere with but Gary never would.
It is in essence a story about “manifesting”, the conviction that by willing something enough it will come to pass, with nods to the concept of the Nietzschean Übermensch (Gary is lecturing on Nietzsche when we first meet him), and a gentle interrogation of the concept of the self and how it might all be an illusion (another topic Gary handily lectures on).
Or is it a story about method acting? Hmm. The screenplay is co-written by Powell himself, along with Linklater, so there might be some mileage there.
Arjona is of course a good-looking woman and spectacularly attractive when she turns it on but something is not entirely there in the Powell/Arjona chemistry, which is the hook this film needs to latch on to in order to fly. There’s also an insistence on giving the plot an extra twist when it’s already complicated enough early on. On the upside, Austin Amelio is very funny as Jasper, a wired victim of cancel culture and an example of what happens to guys who live on their wits for too long.
I saw Linklater speaking on the promo trail for this film at the British Film Institute some time back and beyond laying out its high-concept – the hit man who isn’t – he didn’t have overly much to say about it, and seemed to want to get off the subject. To be fair to him, the madly productive Linklater’s mind was maybe more wrapped up in Blue Moon or Nouvelle Vague, both of which he’d shot in the interim.
Though there’s an empty Tom Cruise action-hero slot waiting for him, Powell seems happy to zig-zag all over the place at the moment. He seems to be tasting the air, doing more comedy than you might expect (such as Anyone But You with Sydney Sweeney and How to Make a Killing with Margaret Qualley) and deploying the wry eyebrow perhaps more than is necessary. I suspect there is a frustrated serious actor in there somewhere, who is doing all this stuff because it ensures a rapid rise to the top and generates heaps of cash. Either way, right now he looks pretty much unstoppable.
Hit Man – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
