Or roles, really: The more Gary gets into it, the more he realizes that each person’s fantasy of a hit man is different, and he starts to dress up, preparing for the part before he meets with the client. (If this movie were solely constructed as a de facto reel demonstrating Powell’s range, it would work just fine.) Then, one day, pretending to be a sexy, confident hit man named Ron, he meets Madison (Adria Arjona, practically glowing from within), a put-upon housewife seeking his services. And everything changes for Gary.
A great deal of the enjoyment of “Hit Man” comes from simply witnessing Powell and Arjona’s white-hot chemistry. Seeing Powell transmogrify from nerdy Gary to five o’clock shadow Ron and back again is both hilarious and tantalizing, while Arjona has a big-eyed innocence crossed with wily smarts that keeps everyone, including Gary, guessing. Multiple layers of deception keep the movie from feeling formulaic — you’re always trying to keep track of who thinks what, and why. Eventually, when “Hit Man” morphs into a kind of caper comedy, part of the joy is rooting for characters as they make choices that are, at best, flexibly ethical. In doing so, we get to be naughty too. In a movie starring a philosophy professor, that’s especially funny, a wry joke on us all.
But there’s more surprising philosophical depth in “Hit Man” than meets the eye. While on the surface it’s more or less a romantic comedy, beneath the hood it’s a coming-of-age story for Gary, whose life has stagnated. After a divorce, he lives alone with his two cats named Id and Ego and a large collection of plants; his students make fun of him for driving a Honda Civic, and he eats cereal for dinner. Gary is perfectly content with his life, or at least he thinks he is. But it slowly becomes clear the simplicity is less choice and more comfort zone. He’s lost himself somewhere along the way. He’s ruled out the possibility of surprise and adventure. Being a fake hit man gives him the possibility of inhabiting other selves, other lives — of trying on identities for size.
The question of the self — where it resides, whether we’re stagnant or able to change — has long been a fixation for philosophers, and Gary is no different. He declares his “primary interest” to be “the eternal mystery of human consciousness and behavior.” At the start of the semester, he tells his students that they’ll be challenging the notion of the self that semester, from social identity to close relationships. “What if your ‘self’ is a construction, an illusion, an act, a role you’ve been playing every day since you can remember?” he asks them, smiling. Teacher, teach thyself.
That inquiry is woven throughout “Hit Man,” which takes a definite point of view on the subject. Yes, the self is changeable — but it takes a bit of bravery to discover who you want to be. What’s more, no man is an island. The self doesn’t change when we grit our teeth and decide to be different, but when other people see us, recognize who we are and decide to love us for it.
