Cinema: Sicario (“Hit man”) – Process

MEXICO CITY (apro).-The Texan Richard Linklater and the actor Glen Powell are inspired by a real case that a magazine, Texas Monthly, published in 2001: The late Gary Johnson would have worked as a fake hitman for the State Police.

The script soars with the adventure of how Gary is going to build a different character for each of his cases, and once the client hires him to eliminate someone, the police step in and arrest him; Everything is going well until Gary (Glen Powell) falls in love with a woman who seeks to rent him to murder her husband who beats her; It sounds cakey and already widely seen, but Hit Man (United States, 2023) is a fun comedy, with an intelligent handling of the tradition of neo noir cinema that goes from Melville to David Fincher, only without taking itself seriously.

Glen Powell, known only for his supporting roles, reveals himself as a versatile actor, capable of writing a script, until developing the role in an arc that goes from the leisure of a philosophy and psychology professor, fond of observing the life of birds, to the dangerous game of presenting himself as a bully to the taste of the consumer. Richard Linklater, director with more than thirty years of independent cinema, known for the After Dawn trilogy or Bernie, activist against the death penalty, has demonstrated throughout his career that Texas is more than just hostility to undocumented immigrants, chili with meat and reactionary governors; He has never accepted living in Hollywood.

This time the action moves to New Orleans in Louisiana, the city only appears from the side. Hit Man directs the visual talent towards the different hitman costumes played by Powell, and to the beauty of the Puerto Rican Adria Arjona in the role of a femme fatale taken from one of the James Bond girls. Gary Johnson presents himself from the beginning as a guy concerned with the notion of identity, in his classes he talks about Nietzsche, he confronts his students with the idea that what they believe they are is just a construction; Divorced, he lives alone with a pair of cats, Id and Ego; He also works for the police in technical support and psychological analysis, and when he is offered to replace the infiltrator to incriminate possible murderers, he discovers that he has a talent for designing different personas of how the client would imagine the hitman according to his own fantasy.

Unlike the typical sitcom where everything happens by accident and the protagonist falls gratuitously into absurd situations, in Hit Man Gary is predisposed, ready to venture into new flows of possible identities and take risks, unethical, but protected by the police itself; Furthermore, the starting point of the story is real, something very similar happened with the late Gary Johnson. The chameleon game, on the verge of multiple personality syndrome, becomes an entertaining package of surprises and occurrences, all of which invites the viewer to question, without falling into blackness, the subjection of identity to a cultural construction; As Linklater proposed in his twelve-year experimental film, Boyhood, in which he follows a boy’s development through adolescence, the playful impulse, the ability to play, represents the best in life.

Hitman premieres on Netflix and in commercial theaters.