HIT MAN (2024)

Here's the short version: a genuinely funny, well-built comic thriller talks itself into an ending Movieguide can't endorse — so skip it.

The first two acts have real pleasures. Glen Powell is charming as a mild professor moonlighting as a police department's fake hit man, the plot twists land, and the romance has energy. If the movie had stopped there, or resolved with some cost to its hero's dishonesty, this would be a very different review.

It doesn't. The film piles on more than 120 obscenities, two explicit-enough bedroom scenes, and then closes by rewarding its main character's deceit and lawbreaking with exactly the happy ending he wanted — no reckoning required. That's not a minor misstep; it's the whole point of the film's final act, and it's why an entertaining script ends up promoting something Movieguide can't wave through.

Skip it, and choose something else for the evening.

Gary Johnson is a mild-mannered professor who moonlights for the New Orleans Police Department — as a fake hit man. Different disguises, different personas, all designed to catch people looking to pay someone to kill an enemy. It's a good gig, until a client named Madison catches his eye. Posing as "Ron," Gary helps her get free of an abusive marriage — but Madison's husband has other plans, and he wants to hire Gary's hit man persona for a job of his own.

Three stars means real craft with a serious asterisk. The first stretch of the film works: funny, well-paced, romantic, with plot twists that genuinely engage. Richard Linklater and Glen Powell (who co-wrote the script) build a likable hero and a story that, for a while, drifts toward the sly menace of a film noir like Body Heat.

Then it swerves. The tone shifts serious, the noir instincts the film had been building evaporate, and the ending arrives feeling eccentric and unearned rather than satisfying. A script this entertaining, with a hero this interesting, deserved a resolution that didn't ask the audience to cheer for lawbreaking and deceit. The talent on screen is real. The choice at the finish line squanders it.

Hit Man runs on a strong Romantic, antinomian worldview — one where two heinous crimes go unpunished and the hero, a teacher of philosophy and psychology, ends his arc by telling his students "there are no moral absolutes," urging them instead to invent their own identity and destiny. That claim collapses on itself: to say there are no moral absolutes is itself an absolute claim, denying and asserting moral truth in the same breath.

There are better threads here, even if the film doesn't follow them to their conclusion. Gary's police work protects a woman from real danger; his bosses are portrayed as good cops doing good work; justice, for a while, looks real. The film also includes LGBT content worth flagging for families: a visible transgender flag and a pride flag outside a New Orleans bar, plus a scene where a policeman comically agrees he'd rather be with his colleague's charismatic undercover persona than her boring real self.

What the film ultimately can't shake is its ending's verdict: that lying your way into the life you want is a fair trade, so long as it works out. Scripture disagrees. "There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death" (Proverbs 14:12). A happy ending built on deceit isn't the same thing as a good one.

There's a genuinely good movie buried in the first two-thirds of Hit Man — funny, romantic, well-built. But a story is judged by where it lands, and this one lands by rewarding lies and lawlessness with a happy ending. Our answer stands: skip it. Looking for something to watch instead? Start here:.