Richard Linklater’s latest film, and his first for Netflix, is a loose adaptation of the life of Gary Johnson, played here by Glenn Powell, who came to the public’s attention by way of a 2001 article by Texas Monthly journalist Skip Hollandsworth. Johnson’s day job was as a college professor in psychology but he also built a side career in the late 1980s and 1990s working as a fake hitman for the Houston Police Department in order to entrap clients. Linklater’s script takes a few liberties with the truth, especially when it comes to Johnson’s relationship with Madison Figueroa Masters, played by Adria Arjona, a woman who approaches him to kill her abusive husband. What ensues plays as a throwback to the caper films and con biopics of the early 2000s – think Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Catch Me If You Can and Ocean’s Eleven – and a conscious movement away from recent film and television’s interest in the scammer-industrial complex of the 2010s and 2020s. This latter swathe of texts, which includes The Dropout, Inventing Anna, Super Pumped and WeCrashed, exhibits a deep scepticism about the figure of the entrepreneur in American culture. While Linklater doesn’t exactly annul that, he celebrates the scammer in a minor mode – the scammer as an extension of the slacker. Powell is a great fit for the role, since his screen persona often revolves around the way in which the shmuck of the 80s and 90s has lost his currency in the last decade, and entered a silver age. Powell’s shmuck therefore feels like a descendant of the 90s slacker – a vision of American masculinity in a minor mode, drifting picaresquely through a world that has exceeded it. 

Hit Man also builds an interesting dialogue between big and small screen entertainment. Gary describes being a hit man as a cinematic fantasy, against a montage of him appropriating classic hit man scenes. His job is to maintain the fantasy of a hit man to catch people looking for murder for hire, which means he has to play into his client’s deepest fantasies as well, epitomised by a woman who also treats him as a gigolo. This is an even more picaresque prospect in that Gary is a slacker at heart; by his own admission, he could never summon enough energy to die or kill for anything. Only in the fictional space of murder-to-hire can he replace his slacker sensibility with an immaculate and continually rotating sense of mise-en-scene, and my favourite moments in the film were when he revolved through his various hit man personae. The effect was a little like the sequences in the series The Americans when the two leads move seamlessly from one spy disguise to the next.

I also appreciated the film’s relish for dialogue as a form of cinematic storytelling. Most of Hit Man is spent in conversation, and Powell’s delivery is terrific, offbeat and authoritative at the same time. Unfortunately, I found the screenplay itself quite limp, with the result that the talkiness often grew tedious. Lots of the film is Gary explaining stuff – psychological concepts, to his students; the hit man role, to his clients; and the history of his love life, to his girlfriend. This explaining-aesthetic works really well in the final scene, when Gary has to record a conversation with Madison for the police while giving her a set of contradictory instructions on his phone to ensure that she doesn’t incriminate herself. Apart from that, though, the endless verbiage felt pretty flat, and in many ways encapsulated the strangeness of seeing Linklater in a Netflix venue. Linklater’s unmediated aesthetic was novel on the big screen, in the context of a 90s theatrical milieu, but it’s less surprising on Netflix, since immediacy is the bread-and-butter of the platform, even more so now, ten years into its existence as a primary streaming service. To see Linklater’s auteurist style morphing into the Netflix style is a bit of a strange sight, and ends up diminishing both, making for a film that doesn’t quite feel attuned to either big or small screens.

Of course, that’s part of the pleasure of Hit Man as well. Since it exists between big and small screens, it feels like a bridge to a new era of cinematic celebrity, as does Powell’s continuous experimentation with different personae. The ending is interesting in that respect, as the persona of the hit man becomes inextricable from Gary and Madison’s relationship, which can’t exist without their shared fantasy of each other. There are some interesting points here about desire, and the way it always needs a third party to mediate the relationship between two people, that recalls Linklater’s Before trilogy in particular. Still, I thought this was more a great story than a great movie; Netflix just doesn’t seem the right venue for Linklater’s immediacy aesthetic. Whereas A Family Affair, my pick for the most underrated film of 2024, felt like a mid-budget multiplex era film that had found its way into the back corners of Netflix, Hit Man feels like an exhaustion of Netflix, and perhaps an exhaustion of Linklater’s indie style too. Personally, I thought his recent documentary about his hometown in the God Save Texas miniseries was far more compelling and engaging, while his ongoing work on Merrily We Roll Along suggests he still has his sights set on grander visions than Netflix allows.