Hit Man? Or, “A Little OverHYPED, Man”?
Plus, catch up on what you've missed!
Inside: A rundown of my thoughts after watching Hit Man, and a chance to catch up on what you might have missed the past few weeks!
Have you ever played Vulture’s Cinematrix game? It’s like Wordle and Connections except not like those at all and strictly involving movies. You get a matrix with nine squares and nine total guesses [so unless you’re having an amazing day or know movies way better than I do, which is very possible, you likely won’t fill all the squares a lot of the time].
You get a certain amount of points for each square you answer: more points for answers that fewer people also guessed. So, the more obscure the movie you can come up with, the more points!1
Anyways! Here’s mine from May 30th:
Any commenter who can get one for that empty Olivia Colman square gets a shout-out in the next newsletter! [No cash prize, sorry, this is Bake Off rules, baby.]
And if ONE movie grid game isn’t enough for you, you can also get a daily one from:
My morning rituals!
Hit Man: Kind of a letdown
I was very, very excited about this movie, as I explained in last week’s preview. Richard Linklater is a skilled auteur director and Glen Powell is the movie star of the moment!
Unfortunately, I must report that I found it very … meh. I’ve been puzzling as to how a project with so many quality pieces could end up with such a mediocre result, and I decided that Netflix must have a secret rule book outlining how to make your project as mediocre as possible.2
AND YET: This film has a 97% Critics Score and a 95% Audience Score on Rotten Tomatoes!? This is inexplicable to me! I’d give it a 59 percent??3 Am I crazy?? The whole time, I really thought it was going to be more than it was. Like I really thought they were going to do something…more clever. And that’s on me. But it’s also on them!!
PRO: It IS a star-making machine for Glen, and for that I salute them. He plays a nerdy psychology professor working for the New Orleans Police Department as a fake hit man. He gets to play tiny little bits of totally different characters, and he really nails it. That’s where the movie is having its most fun and succeeding the most.
If this was just a movie about what it’s like to be a fake-hit-man savant, it would be an awesome movie!!
CONS: Instead of that, they tried to make it a bunch of other things. Everyone is like “Wow, they really played with different genres.” Sure, if by “play” you mean the way I “play” basketball. [Which is: Poorly and in a way that most people would not recognize as basketball! A lot of swatting!]
They sexed it up a lot which, normally, I’d be perfectly pleased with. But somehow — despite the fact that there’s great sexy banter [a Linklater staple, as you’ll know if you watched the “Before trilogy“] and great sexy sex — it’s all very bland?? The whole time it seems to be building to a plot-twisty, complex payoff. It seems like a puzzle! And then it’s just … not.
The REAL problem is that Madison, the love interest, sucked. She was a perfectly constructed shallow male fantasy of a woman. Which would have been fine if she turned out to be a classic femme fatale: A woman who intentionally emphasizes her sensuality for her own purposes. But — spoiler alert — she wasn’t! She was just A PERSON with NO ULTERIOR MOTIVES, who acted like NO WOMAN in HISTORY HAS EVER ACTED. Everything about her is so unrealistic and legitimately problematic. [She’s supposed to have been trapped in such an abusive marriage that she wanted to kill her husband — and yet she pretty much instantly bounces back from it and is like “I love puppies and having lots of sex with no strings attached!”!?]
You know what’s extra crazy? Linklater was actually asked why she’s such a flat character. And he said that it’s because the movie is a “character study” of Glen Powell’s character, so she was intentionally written exclusively from his perspective.
Oh, really?! A sexy, personality-free woman with no attachments whose entire purpose in the film is to serve the male perspective?
HOW BRAVE.
Catch Up on What You’ve Missed!
Over the past few weeks, we’ve been slowly previewing and reviewing all the new summer stuff! Here’s what you might have missed:
In which we review:
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga [desert torture movie]
Challengers [the Zendaya threesome tennis movie]
The Fall Guy [summer flick personified]
Babes [Ilana Glazer and Michelle Buteau in “The ‘Bridesmaids’ of childbearing”]
Civil War [one for the journalism girlies!]
In which we preview:
Bad Boys: Ride or Die (June 5)
Hit Man (June 7)
The Watchers (June 7)
Inside Out 2 (June 14)
The Bikeriders (June 21)
Kinds of Kindness (June 21)
Horizon: An American Saga (June 28)
A Quiet Place: Day One (June 28)
Beverly Hills Cop: Alex F (July 3)
Fly Me to the Moon (July 12)
Sing Sing (July 12)
Twisters (July 19)
Deadpool & Wolverine (July 26)
Borderlands (August 9)
Trap (August 9)
It Ends With Us (August 9)
Alien: Romulus (August 16)
Blink Twice (August 23)
The Crow (August 23)
In which we preview:
Bridgerton Season 4 (and review of Part 1)
Hacks Season 3 (Out now)
We Are Lady Parts Season 2 (Out now)
Couples Therapy Season 4 (Out now)
Doctor Who Season 14 (Out now)
The Boys Season 4 (June 13)
House of the Dragon Season 2 (June 16)
The Bear Season 3 (June 27)
Rings of Power Season 2 (August 29)
That’s it for this week, folks! I’d love to hear what you’re watching, loving, loathing, looking forward to! Drop a comment or a heart — it gives me LIFE, and also helps me grow! 💜
[I really nailed the obscurity points earlier this week with “Elijah Wood + 1990-2010.” I solved with Forever Young, the 1992 movie where Mel Gibson gets cryo-frozen and wakes up 50 years later and meets 10-year-old Elijah Wood? Whose hot single mom is played by Jamie Lee Curtis? And Elijah keeps Mel in his treehouse until Jamie Lee finds out!? I am not making this up!!]
[There is proof that this is actually happening, although a physical “How to Be Mid” Rulebook might just be a flight of my fancy.]
[Ben gives it an 85%! Of course he does!]
Oooooo, GREAT review! I say this with the caveat I haven’t seen it, but the flat female character criticism comes in with your incredible ability to cut through the B.S. on this topic, as ever!! (I still remember you shredding Everything Is Illuminated [the book] for the same reason, when I was gaga over it, and I was like… ohhh….)
Just watched the movie and, as a screenwriter myself, am pissed that it got such great reviews as I found it weak and too long. Also, I couldn’t stomach Madison’s character or the acting. “We get it. You’re hot.”