There’s a passage in Everybody Wants Some where Powell’s character and the new pitcher sample all the societies on campus one night slamming against punk rockers, but milling about with theater kids. At first, Powell in HitMan Afdah seems to be the exact opposite of Gary Johnson. He’s a college professor, a young divorcee, living with two cats and working as a part-time tech for the New Orleans police. One day he has been asked to entrap a cop who goes undercover as an assassin to entrap a customer. He is reluctant and seems ill-prepared, but there is a mystery once he gets into character. People who wait their whole lives to play frontman are better prepared than they realize when the opportunity presents itself.
Before Gary takes on his first job, there is a montage of classic films, from This Gun For Fire to A Colt Is My Passport . It’s a stylistic outlier in the film, but it puts it in conversation with the genre nonetheless, allowing Linklater to use his tropes but also send it up as Gary traps one criminal after another and his outfit becomes more stylish : gossipy tattooed gun nut, slicked-back . The Patrick Bateman type with the hair, the Eastern European Angel of Death, the man with the scar face, the leather jacket, the Clint Eastwood whisper and my favorite moment when he goes to meet a client because it really can’t be anything else Tilda Swinton and he wrote.
When Jane Greer enters Out of the Past and approaches Robert Mitchum, we hear her voice on the soundtrack: “And then I saw her, coming out of the sun, and I knew why Whit didn’t care for that forty grand.” It’s there.” no hit man noir.” The Please You restaurant wasn’t quite as romantic as the Acapulco bar, but Madison does come out of the sun and Gary’s life isn’t perfect from then on and the movie isn’t perfect, he turns from a dry comedy that it’s about a misfit’s fate to a beautiful relentless love.
Madison has arrived to employ Ron to assassinate her violent spouse. But the two of them are drawn into other conversations, laugh a little, and keep playing. As he has with other clients, she gives him a chance to step back and he takes it. Then he calls her a few months later, and the romance becomes obsolete. She thinks he’s a murderer, her ex-husband doesn’t know there’s a boyfriend, and the police don’t know Gary is seeing a previous suspect. It wouldn’t work in a noir, but this is a romantic comedy, a very different approach to the idea of fate.
Gary teaches philosophy, which is a course the Linklater professor can take. Its members, from Dazed and Confused to Waking Life to the Before films, often consider the big questions of human existence. The film ends with Gary encouraging his students to “make yourself an identity of your choice” and whether Linklater believes he hears an identity is it more than an ‘independent film’. His last film was a coming-of-age animated drama, and his next film is set in the French New Wave. In a profession so obsessed with fortune and prestige, he seems to shrewdly go beyond just doing any fantastic thing he wants to do.