Few directors can match the buoyancy of Richard Linklater at his best: His shaggy hangout comedies and twilit coming-of-age fables glide by on waves of empathy and exhilaration, the feeling of smooth sailing through untroubled waters. (Think of the gorgeous passage in Before Sunset where Céline and Jesse literally go boating .) But, as with any genuinely ambitious artist—and there’s a case to be made for the autodidactic Austinite as the stealth American master of his entire Gen X cohort—there’s also an undertow to Linklater’s cinema, one that can drag unsuspecting viewers into some sunken places.
Exhibit A would be Linklater’s superb—and wonderfully deceptive—new movie, Hit Man , now out on Netflix, which shames nearly every mainstream romantic comedy in recent memory simply by delivering the genre goods: It’s the sort of movie they don’t make anymore but that they also didn’t necessarily make that well in the first place. It’s got a striking, ostensibly fact-based premise —a university professor impersonates a professional assassin in order to help the local police entrap people who want to commit murder by proxy until he falls in love with a beautiful, would-be client—and all kinds of enticements: a pair of sexy, palpably compatible leads (Glen Powell and Adria Arjona, the latter of whom deserves to be a big star); a twisty, satisfying screenplay loaded with delightful, rat-a-tat dialogue (cowritten by Linklater and Powell); and the kind of sw.
