If, as Tony Soprano once said, “remember when is the lowest form of conversation,” then it’s cousin “they don’t make ‘em like they used to” might be the lowest form of criticism. It’s certainly a trope I’ve fallen victim to in the past, especially when it comes to writing about music, but that doesn’t make me or the statement any less lazy or desperate. As such, I probably should have realized something was up when it became the common theme of the positive reviews garnered by Hit Man, Richard Linklater’s independently produced, Netflix-acquired, Glen Powell and Adria Arjona starring romantic comedy about an undercover police asset and the suspect he falls in love with, which has been praised as the kind of breezy, clever romantic comedy that was once common 20 years ago but has since been shunted aside in favor of superhero spectacles and other IP-reliant tentpoles. Even The Ringer’s Adam Nayman, who conceded that Hit Man is “the sort of movie they don’t make anymore but that they also didn’t necessarily make that well in the first place,” is also a loud and proud member of the cult, going on to praise the film’s “sexy, palpably compatible leads,” its “twisty, satisfying screenplay,” and its “swift, effortless craftsmanship that’s all but disappeared from mid-budget movie-making.”

Well, at least he’s right about the leads. He’s also right about the first two-thirds of the movie, at least until the script, written by Linklater and Powell, reveals itself to be more meandering and awkward than it initially appears, and before the blankness of Linklater’s style removes all sense of shock and tension in favor of an understatement that may have been intended to come across as impish but instead feels staid and stilted. For whatever reason, Hit Man was one of the rare movies where I came in knowing next to nothing about the plot, and while the story itself isn’t entirely complicated, I was left scratching my head trying to figure out what, exactly, this movie was supposed to be and why, exactly, critics are giving what feels like an ultimately bungled product not only a pass, but an enthusiastic seal of approval. I’m used to movies making me feel excited, disappointed, enthralled, angry – but I don’t know that I’ve ever felt as baffled by a film as Hit Man.

That’s a damn shame, because it’s built on a fairly solid premise, and an even more solid one-two punch of lust-worthy leads. Powell plays Gary Johnson (a real person with no relation to the former New Mexico governor and Libertarian presidential candidate, as far as I know), a psychology and philosophy professor at the University of New Orleans who moonlights as a video and audio technician for sting operations run by his home city’s police department. Donned in dad-shorts and fisherman sandals, Gary is portrayed as both smug and dorky, someone who doesn’t struggle with interpersonal relationships so much as he believes himself to be above them, preferring to hang with his cats Id and Ego in favor of fostering real human connection. This sense that he could have a meaningful personal life, but that he just chooses not to, becomes apparent to him when he’s tapped to fill in for Jasper (Austin Amelio), a suspended cop who typically plays the role of hit man in NOPD’s undercover operations. Thrust into the role, the hitherto reserved Gary discovers another side of himself, transforming from meek academic into swaggering movie star, nailing a disgruntled roughneck for conspiracy to murder in the process. The spot start develops into a second career for Gary, who not only relishes the opportunity to witness humanity’s depravity up close, but also clearly gets a kick out of trying on a different set of personalities that lets him charm and ultimately ensnare his prey. Indeed, the most fun parts of the movie come as we watch Gary string the suspects along in a series of ever more ridiculous personas, ranging from a leather-clad Russian flunky, a Jason Bateman rip-off, and a skeet-shooting redneck reminiscent of past Linklater muse Matthew McConaughey.  

But more than just playing dress up, Gary’s side gig allows him to explore the questions of identity he ponders alongside his students. Is our persona determined by nature, or can we proactively construct it? Gary, who’s something of a nihilist, seems to believe in the former, until he meets Madison (Arjona), a woman looking to knock off her controlling husband. Despite entering the diner they agree to meet at with a smoldering, Brad Pitt-esque charisma, Gary (playing “Ron”) winds up being thrown off-kilter by Madison’s plight and, well, her looks. Very quickly, their murder consultation turns into a meet cute, and “Ron” advises Madison to take the money she would pay him (and that would guarantee her arrest) and use it to leave her husband and build a new life instead. She takes his advice, and the two begin a steamy affair in which Gary never leaves the Ron persona, a roleplaying exercise that allows him to perform in a way he never thought possible in both the bedroom and the classroom (“when did our professor get hot?” a student asks, as if she just realized that he was being played by Glen Powell).

As I said, combine this pretty clever premise with two very attractive leads, and it feels like you should have an, ahem, hit on your hands. And yet, the script’s meandering pace and Linklater’s difficulty in conveying a sense of tone or stakes undercuts what should be the movie’s strengths. Perhaps it’s unfair of me to roll my eyes into the back of my head Doctor Strange-style and contemplate all of the various directions this movie could have and perhaps should have gone, but I had no choice. At first, I thought it was going to be a screwball comedy a la Some Like It Hot; then I thought it was going to be a darkly comic Coens caper where two people go to depraved lengths to maintain their happiness. But Hit Man never turned into those movies. To be honest, it never really turned into anything at all, thanks to Linklater’s complete refusal to use the filmic elements at his disposal – score, cinematography, editing – to ratchet up the tension or punctuate the film’s big moments. I don’t need a movie to tell me when a character’s made a shocking reveal,  but I would like to have some sense of what the director would like me to feel, and how the different plot points fit in with the rest of the story. Instead, nearly everything that happens in Hit Man is depicted so glibly and casually that, by the time things do start to get a bit hairy for our leads, it feels like it comes out of nowhere. Fans of the film might claim that this is an example of Linklater successfully subverting the viewer’s expectations, but I’d argue that instead it’s a failure to establish tone. Thanks to the film’s flat visuals and lack of rhythm, I didn’t feel surprised or scandalized – instead, I felt nothing at all, and couldn’t shake the sense that Linklater was merely coasting off of the charisma of his two leads.

It doesn’t help that Gary’s early work as a fake hit man feels relatively danger-free as well. Nayman writes in The Ringer that we’re meant to be disturbed by “how Linklater’s New Orleans seems to be populated exclusively by desperate, angry people who feel that their lives are one clandestine assassination away from getting back on track,” creating an “overall atmosphere of seething, barely repressed rage.” That may have been Linklater’s intention, but considering that the scenes with the would-be-murder-accomplises are shot and acted with all of the weight of an episode of Burn Notice, that atmosphere of rage is never successfully conjured up; you get the sense that they’re supposed to be both funny and sad, but in execution they’re neither funny nor sad enough to generate much of a reaction. The same goes for Gary/Ron and Madison’s affair. Considering it’s not only built on fraud, but the apparent attractiveness/empowering nature of pretending like one of the people involved is a contract killer, it should feel a little dirtier, more dangerous, and more problematic than it does. Instead, it feels like a lightweight romance novel, at least until it does decide to get marginally more real, at which point it threw me into that state of non-whiplash whiplash again. 

In fact, Linklater fails so spectacularly in his ability to craft an appropriate tone for this movie that I found myself considering that he may actually be endorsing some of the nastier things he depicts. Gary opens the film discussing Nietzsche with his students, and I couldn’t help but wonder if his deceptive, sociopathic behavior was meant to be a manifestation of the philosopher’s will to power, justifiable in the sense that the character is using his natural talents to satisfy his own natural desires, a thought that occurred to me during the film’s final, shocking act of violence. I won’t reveal the victim for the sake of spoilers, but let’s just say that the film seems to rationalize their death given the character’s past behavior and a lecture Gary delivers earlier in the film in which he explains that the execution of dangerous people was an important step in human evolution. Again, I don’t think Linklater is endorsing the extra-judicial murder of people dangerous to society, but the film’s flat affect and bizarre, tacked-on ending don’t exactly dissuade me from that notion either.

I’m already dreading being told by someone that I just don’t get Hit Man, that I don’t understand that it’s supposed to be subversive or ambiguous. But a film needs a defined sense of style or atmosphere so that we know what it’s trying to subvert or be ambiguous about. Hit Man and its confounding blandness isn’t clear about any of that. Instead, it throws what should be wild shifts in mood at you in the cinematic equivalent of monotone, never engendering the sense of humor, paranoia, or desperation that an effective version of this story requires. As a sizzle reel for the chemistry between its two leads, you couldn’t ask for more. But anyone looking for a movie with a defined point of view or sense of style will be left bewildered and asking themselves why they don’t, in fact, make ‘em like they used to.