Fassbender’s nameless hit man is ostensibly the pinnacle of the type. David Fincher’s latest is a pastiche evoking French New Wave forefather Jean Pierre-Melville planted in the 21st century, as an unnamed assassin (Michael Fassbender) goes on a globe-trotting rampage of revenge following a botched assignment. The film is both a subversion of the hit man and a celebration.Īt first glance, The Killer is the kind of film that Linklater is taking aim at. Living a double life ultimately teaches him to become his best self beyond the boring homebody he used to be, setting up the assassin as, funnily enough, an aspirational figure. Gary, played with such intense charisma by Glen Powell that he cements himself as leading man material, embraces the falsehoods of hit men wholeheartedly, switching up disguises and personas to cater to his marks. They’ve been a mainstay of the summer blockbuster-full-throttle action thrillers, the John Wicks of the world-but Linklater’s offbeat comedy that has all the hallmarks of the endangered mid-budget studio film finds the fun in placing the archetype into an entirely new context. Linklater tells the viewer straight up that contract killers are a fabrication made up by Hollywood-an imaginary profession that just looks pretty fucking cool on camera. In Richard Linklater’s Hit Man, a comedy inspired by the actual fake assassin Gary Johnson, a college professor takes up a part-time gig as an undercover hit man to catch would-be murderers for the New Orleans police. It’s only fitting for a stranger-than-usual year for movies. But these new films from established directors take wildly different perspectives on such an enduring character, each funnier and weirder than the last.
At the Venice Film Festival, it wasn’t hard to find the dominant thread: there were a lot of hit men movies. Once you spend enough time at a film festival, you inevitably begin to notice patterns-all the movies watched in quick succession start to become an indiscernible blur, and the mind draws connections just to make sense of it all.
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