Director: Richard Linklater
Writers: Richard Linklater, Glen Powell
Stars: Glen Powell, Adria Arjona, Austin Amelio
Synopsis: A professor moonlighting as a hitman of sorts for his city police department descends into dangerous, dubious territory when he finds himself attracted to a woman who enlists his services.
There’s an age-old debate in the modern film sphere on the question of sex in movies, on whether or not it’s socially acceptable to showcase sex scenes in modern cinema because there’s allegedly no “point” to them. Yes, the sex scenes in Tommy Wiseau’s The Room were fairly pointless and stretched the runtime of that movie to no end, but that’s one very bad example of a very bad movie.
But when a serious movie decides to be sexy and showcase a pure liberation of the human body, either through “furious jumping” in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things or through the psychosexual relationship the protagonists have with a tennis court in Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers (two recent examples), most audiences prefer to shrug at its apparent “endless” depiction of sex instead of engaging with what it’s presenting on screen. This results in a culture that’s afraid of even talking about sex, labeling it as a taboo subject when it is indeed a natural part of life and a form of liberation for many.
But why are we so afraid, or why do we care at all? Responsible adult viewers should be able to stomach the realities of life, including sex, in motion pictures, and yet talk about how “children will be exposed to this,” when none of the movies that talk about (or showcase) sex are marketed (or rated) for them. This creates a problem for the sexiest genre of all – romantic comedies, which have grown to become more sexless and glossy even when two hot people share the screen and create a decidedly passionate (and sexy) chemistry.
This is incredibly apparent in Red, White & Royal Blue, which stars two good-looking individuals with zero chemistry and erotic tension and is shot in the vein of a Hallmark picture. It’s particularly insulting when you find out that the cinematographer, Stephen Goldblatt, shot two of the greatest gay motion pictures of all time, Batman Forever and Batman & Robin, to which he was nominated for an Oscar for his work in the former, directed by a queer cinema legend, the late Joel Schumacher.
People may be conditioned to hate those movies, but the sexually charged frames Goldblatt creates are enough to entice intense homoerotic energy through Val Kilmer/George Clooney’s Batman and Chris O’Donnell’s Robin (the “not just a friend, a partner” hand-clasp in Batman Forever remains one of the most powerfully erotic images in all of comic book cinema), stuff that is no longer produced in mainstream cinema, except for when Luca Guadagnino decided to make cannibalism and tennis sexy in Bones and All and Challengers.
But a new challenger has arrived in the ring with Hit Man from Richard Linklater, perhaps one of the most sauceless and overhyped filmmakers working today (I said what I said). I rarely vibe with his movies because his style is so rudimentary that it rarely has room to breathe, and his actors don’t have much leeway in making their performances feel natural. It’s probably why I hated Boyhood so much and have only enjoyed a limited amount of his work, which includes School of Rock, A Scanner Darkly, Bad News Bears, Dazed and Confused, and its spiritual sequel, Everybody Wants Some!!
So consider me skeptical when massive raves for Hit Man occurred when it premiered at the Venice Film Festival last year and a subsequent festival premiere at TIFF, where Netflix acquired its U.S distribution rights for $20 million, calling it one of the sexiest films of the year, and one of Linklater’s finest achievements. With such a usually flat visual aesthetic permeating most of his filmography, how could Linklater create romantic tension, even if he has two of the hottest stars leading his picture through Glen Powell and Adria Arjona?
Simply put, he lets them be hot and in charge of their tension as the story progresses. From the minute Arjona is introduced in the picture, there’s an indelible sense of a potential romance blossoming between the two, even if they may not know it yet. Madison (Arjona) shows up at a restaurant in the hopes that Gary (Powell), under the hit man alias Ron, will kill her abusive husband (Evan Holtzman), and is willing to pay a large sum for it. But she doesn’t know that “Ron” does not exist and isn’t even a hitman. Gary, a professor of philosophy, has been doing part-time undercover work for the police to set up sting jobs to arrest people who demand the services of a hitman after undercover cop Jasper (Austin Amelio) was suspended for 120 days.
It not only turns out that Gary is very good at creating façades and disguises to lure potential clients in, but he enjoys the thrill of appearing to give people the opportunity of hitman services before they are ultimately arrested. But when Madison appears, everything changes. He begins to see her more frequently, through his Ron façade, and the two build one of the sexiest on-screen romances seen in a Linklater picture, and perhaps the most interesting romantic story of his career (yes, more intriguing than Jesse and Céline in the Before trilogy).
It’s not hard for Linklater to slightly make the romance feel sexier through his lens, and he carefully calibrates his frames as their relationship evolves. Look at the way Madison is introduced as an example – a massive departure from the clinical style Linklater adopts when focusing on Gary (but in the case of this film, it makes sense because Gary is, himself, a clinical guy). Instead, he blurs the frame so that we only see her shadow until she shows up in the foreground and sits down. The tension is already palpable, but when she eats a piece of “Ron’s” pie, the energy cranks up a notch and never lets up.
The rest of the film sees Linklater play with this hypersexual energy as the two take their relationship to a more serious level, without Madison knowing that “Ron” isn’t a hitman. This creates some impeccably timed comedy as Jasper gets back into the field and learns that things aren’t what they seem between Gary and Madison, setting the plot in motion full of well-paced twists and turns that are best left to be discovered on your own.
The chemistry between Powell and Arjona is the only reason why Hit Man is so deliciously entertaining, with the two fully leaning into the characters’ façades they want to put out to one another (Linklater tries to parallel these impulses to the work of Nietzsche, but the philosophical subtext is far less interesting than the psychosexual game the two play with each other). The two expand their façades as they get to “know” more about their personality and, in turn, give the most romantic (and, at times, erotic) performances of their career.
Powell is no stranger to romantic comedies after starring in 2023’s Anyone but You, but he takes the persona he created in this film to a completely different level here, as he’s matched with an actor of equal talent and charm with Arjona, a highly skillful actor who can perfectly modulate her emotional response to Powell’s Gary, whose multiple personalities deftly showcase his versatility. You can definitely tell Arjona’s evolution as an actor in a post Six Underground, Andor, and Irma Vep environment, capturing the sexy thrills of a blossoming romance with an incredible sense of timing and rhythm. The centerpiece scene, in which Madison has to ‘act’ for Gary, confirms her as a singular talent with a breadth of dramatic and comedic range that completely obliterates whatever Sydney Sweeney was doing in Anyone but You.
If anything, Hit Man pushes the tension introduced in Anyone but You much further because it’s far more potent in its eroticism without ever showing it through sex. The implicit looks and exchanges Gary and Madison give to each other have enough powerful sexual energy to make the case for more sex in movies. In such a sexless era of romantic filmmaking, here’s a movie that reminds audiences exactly why sex in movies isn’t a bad thing and will actually make its romance between the two leads far more exciting than if it’s filmed at a Hallmark level with no emotional attachment between the potential couple.
Hit Man shows exactly how modern-day romantic comedies should be: incredibly funny (with a keen eye on society’s warped priorities, through sharp jokes on cancel culture and America’s f–ed up obsession with the Second Amendment) and impeccably sexy, with two impossibly beautiful leads giving the romantic tension needed for us to keep wanting to spend time with them. Yes, it helps that Powell and Arjona know how to act and modulate emotions, which makes their characters feel far more alive in the hands of Linklater than in some of his previous (failed) efforts. As a result, Hit Man is Linklater’s best movie since School of Rock, his greatest achievement. Here’s hoping his next project (including the upcoming Paul Mescal musical he’s currently shooting for twenty years…as if twelve wasn’t enough) will be of equal measure.
