The director of the Before trilogy and Boyhood has created a thriller black comedy that is as classic, as modern, as funny, as disturbing a masterpiece.
Advertisement
“Every pie is a good pie,” replies the protagonist of Hit Man whenever he’s asked about the pie he’s eating. It’s unclear whether this phrase will eventually become part of the requisite one-liners, like, say, “Nobody touches Jesus’ eggs” in The Big Lebowski. But it has attitude. Because it’s absurd, because it’s baffling, because it’s idiotic, and because it is. Definitely no one touches the balls of Gary Johnson, who is none other than the giant Glen Powell.
Hit Man. Murder by Chance, Richard Linklater’s latest marvel, is a comedy. And it is it with the arrogant, enlightened attitude of one who claims that any comedy (with a tempo) is a good comedy. Even if it doesn’t seem that way. In reality and on paper, no one would say it’s a farce. Neither because of its starting point (the story of a would-be assassin) nor because of the direction it soon takes as a reflection on the labyrinths of identity and the very meaning of representation in cinema. As it is. But it is, and with a precision that thrills. To say that it takes time to realise; to say that its devilish pace defies the very measure of time; to say that few films are such faithful images of their time. Indeed, it is time.
The film tells the story of a philosophy professor (Glen Powell) who, to augment his salary, moonlights for the city’s police department as a hit man. Or almost. In reality, what this shy and highly intelligent man does is pose as one of these killers to catch anyone who wants to hire him red-handed. Sort of like an advance crime detector.
What happens, as anyone will soon have deduced, is that it’s very easy to get a taste for the mask if it allows you to be taller, better looking and, more importantly, happier. If we think for a second about what’s happening on every other social network X, we’re on the right track: who are we really, that would be the question. And the cinema screen would be the very mirror in which any reflection becomes the best substitute for reality. The arguments are already woven.
