Glen Powell Makes a Case for Movie Stardom in ‘Hit Man’

After providing such able support in movies like Top Gun: Maverick and Everybody Wants Some!, the actor Glen Powell is ready for some leading-man action. Hs EWS! director Richard Linklater has furnished him with just such an opportunity in the agreeable comedy Hit Man, which premiered here at the Venice Film Festival on Tuesday. A sorta-true story about an average guy who finds himself caught in a web of crime and deception, Hit Man is a cute and clever (sometimes overbearingly so) showcase for Powell’s magnetic charm.

It’s an odd film to premiere at a fancy festival like Venice, so middle-of-the-road is its appeal. Linklater has made another of his broad comedies, not an experimental ramble like the best of his work. But the simple pleasures of Hit Man are quite welcome at this particular juncture in cinema history, in a time when star-driven genre movies that exist mostly to entertain feel in direly short supply.

Perhaps, then, this is Powell’s shot at placing himself in the rarefied company of performers who can open a movie, a roster of folks that was once quite deep but has been reduced—by the creep of I.P. dominance, among other things—to a lonely handful. He makes a persuasive case. Powell plays Gary Johnson, a New Orleans professor of philosophy who does a little work on the side helping the police ensnare folks looking to hire contract killers. A hobbyist electronic tinkerer, Gary is just a tech guy—until a sudden staffing shortage puts him into the field as a fake hit man meeting a real potential client about to incriminate themselves on tape.

This is not the sleek, globetrotting stuff of The Killer, another hit man film at Venice this year. The folks encountered by Gary, who proves surprisingly adept in the undercover role, are mostly regular people with axes to grind. They’re doing a bad thing, to be sure, but they are not sociopathic plutocrats or otherwise amoral operatives of power. Thus Linklater adds some moral shading to Gary’s successful trickery: is his guile drawing people into a crime they maybe weren’t actually going to commit?

The film introduces that ethical question, but doesn’t really dig in. It is more invested in Gary’s talent for deception, which gives Powell the opportunity to put on an array of accents and don a bunch of wigs and false teeth. He’s a creepy British assassin with a red bob, a stern cigar-smoking Russian, a good ol’ boy looking to fuck some shit up. His most successful, and enduring, persona is Ron, a cool customer who is essentially Gary with the confidence and suavity turned up. Gary’s gradual realization is that if Ron was inside him all along, then he can adopt a few of Ron’s best qualities in regular Gary life—thus leading a more active, fulfilled existence.

Powell shrewdly keeps the differences between Gary and Ron subtle, but distinct enough that a sudden switch back to Gary after many scenes of Ron arrives as an amusing shock. It’s nimble work, sexy and sweet at once. Powell does, on occasion, play things a little too slick (which is partly a problem of the script, which he co-wrote with Linklater). And it’s not terribly credible that someone with Gary’s looks and natural charisma would be such a humble wallflower. (This is a “without those glasses, you’re beautiful!” kind of movie.) But isn’t that the suspension of disbelief we have long afforded our movie stars, radiant demigods whom we’ve readily accepted as anonymous, unlucky-in-love normies?

His magnetism finds great complement in Adria Arjona, as a would-be sting target whom Gary, as Ray, dissuades from committing the crime. A risky flirtation begins, leading the film toward its mild, though effective, version of suspense. There is dark possibility here—sex and romance flourishing so adjacent to murderous ideation—but Hit Man prefers to keep things light. Powell and Arjona groove on the film’s kicky patter, tumbling in and out of bed as only movie stars can, in between scenes of zippy dialogue.

Hit Man is determined to be fun above all else, and it largely succeeds in that honorable, populist mission. It entertains, and generously pushes two game performers closer toward the movie-star pantheon. So, naturally, it arrives at Venice without a distributor—an orphan in need of a studio (or, sigh, a streamer) that will take a chance on something as audacious as a star-driven crime comedy. What a novel idea, that anyone might go to the movies to see people scheme and seduce and glow. It’s sadly been many years since Hollywood believed everybody wanted some of that.