Hit Man: Murder for Liar
Last year, Netflix released David Fincher’s The Killer, a fit between director and subject matter that was so hand-in-glove perfect, it practically felt like a self-portrait. Now the streaming giant is “distributing” (to your TV set, if not to your local theater) Richard Linklater’s Hit Man—a less obvious match. Linklater’s career is sufficiently long (his first feature came in 1990) that he can’t be pigeonholed into a single genre, but his best-known works—Dazed and Confused, the Before trilogy, Boyhood—are talky, leisurely dramedies that contemplate the passage of time with relaxed, unforced intimacy. He’s an ambler, not a sprinter. This is the guy to make a movie about an undercover faux assassin?
Turns out, the pairing—like Linklater’s cozy, fluid dialogue—is natural and smooth. That’s partly because Gary Johnson, the New Orleans philosophy professor whose real-life exploits entrapping solicitors of murder were previously chronicled by Skip Hollandsworth in a Texas Monthly article, is less a killer than a bullshitter; he outfoxes his quarry rather than overpowering them. But it’s also because Linklater has wielded his gift for capturing the idiosyncrasies of human connection—the freewheeling conversations, the swirling emotions, the physical attraction—and retrofitted it into a crime-adjacent thriller that’s more concerned with pleasure than violence. The result is a movie that’s consistently enjoyable and even a little suspenseful. Read More
