June 10, 2024
Gary Johnson (Glen Powell) lived alone with his cats and birds, and taught psychology and philosophy at the University of new Orleans. Because of his skills in electronics, he also worked undercover for the police department, hiding cameras and microphones for murder-for-hire cases. One day, Jasper (Austin Amelio), the officer who usually posed as the hitman in their sting operations, was suspended, Gary was suddenly pushed to take his place.
From his very first mission, Gary got the hang of the job and was successful in nailing people who planned to murder other people. One day, he took on the identity of hitman "Ron" to talk to Madison (Adria Arjona), a wife who wanted to hire him to kill her abusive husband Ray Masters (Evan Holtzman). During the course of their conversation, Gary found himself attracted and empathetic towards Madison, and advised her to cancel her planned hit.
This film is the latest project out by veteran director Richard Linklater, who was best known for the "Before" trilogy (1995, 2004, 2013), "School of Rock " (2003), and his Oscar-nominated real-time coming-of-age masterpiece "Boyhood" (2014). Incredibly, Linklater wrote up this story of Gary Johnson loosely-based on an actual person from the 1980s of the same name, occupation, side hustle, who was also asked by woman to kill her boyfriend.
Glen Powell continues his rising career trajectory which got a sudden boost when he played Hangman in "Top Gun: Maverick" (2022), almost 20 years after his feature film debut as a teenager back in 2003. Earlier this year, he starred with Sydney Sweeney in rom-com "Anyone But You," which was a critical and commercial success. Aside from starring as lead actor, Powell also co-wrote this script with Linklater and was also one of the producers.
Powell's Gary was a nerdy professor who smoothly transitioned into a convincing hitman able to make his "clients" say the correct incriminating words from his very first mission, which is hard to believe. Then there was one exciting scene when Arjona's Madison had a sudden unrehearsed conversation with Gary to throw suspicions off her. However, it was just too incredible that Gary and Madison could do spontaneous improv so perfectly. 7/10
***** SPOILER ALERT:
The ending was a little too slick, neat and ideal to be entirely satisfying. As the audience knew everything that really happened, it was disturbing to realize that Linklater and Powell wrote it such that there was no justice forthcoming for the two murders which took place. Whether their reasons for snuffing out those lives were justified or not did not really matter. In the name of feel-good comedy, the killers here actually do get away with murders.
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