At The Movies: Hit Man a hit movie, Origin is admirably ambitious

Hit Man (M18)

115 minutes, available on Netflix
4 stars

The story: Hollywood It Boy Glen Powell plays a mild-mannered New Orleans philosophy professor who has a side hustle posing as a hit man in local police stings. Complications arise when he falls for a beauty (Adria Arjona) engaging him to off her controlling husband (Evan Holtzman).

The screwball neo-noir Hit Man from American director Richard Linklater is based on a true story, however much a professor with the hotness of Powell stretches credibility.

And that is the joke. The academic is Gary Johnson, and the names of his cats – Id and Ego – hint at the comedy’s mischievously played theme on the construct and mutability of identity.

Gary assumes outrageous disguises for his undercover operations. He is such a natural that the suave cold-blooded alias “Ray” he creates, for transactions with his paramour Madison (Arjona), becomes more Gary than Gary. The dorky egghead discovers his true, bada** self by inhabiting the persona of one.

But Madison knows him only as an assassin. Can he sustain a relationship predicated on a fantasy?

It is hard to think too much about this when the gorgeous couple are sizzling up their not-infrequent love scenes.

Indie cinema godhead Linklater has been casting his leading man since Fast Food Nation (2006) and then in Everybody Wants Some!! (2016). This was long before everyone else caught on to Powell’s star power in Top Gun: Maverick (2022) and romcom Anyone But You (2023).

The actor collaborated with Linklater on this screenplay. The entertaining meta-commentary on role-playing doubles as a showcase for his performative range in a lark that is altogether jaunty, twisty, sexy and cheerfully amoral.

Hot take: This cleverly knotty crime yarn kills it.

Origin (NC16)

141 minutes, opens on June 13
3 stars

The story: African-American journalist Isabel Wilkerson (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) seeks to understand the root of human division. The connections she makes between America’s race crimes, Nazi Germany genocide and India’s Dalits would underpin her 2020 non-fiction bestseller Caste: The Origin Of Our Discontents.

Ava DuVernay is not a film-maker who trifles.

Her Emmy-winning 13th (2016) was a documentary on the United States’ prison-industrial complex. And with Selma (2014), her account of the 1965 civil rights marches, she became the first African-American woman nominated for a Best Picture Oscar.

Wilkerson’s investigation fits right into the writer-director-producer’s interrogations of the black American experience.

Origin dramatises Wilkerson’s personal and intellectual journey in conceiving the book. In a multi-strand narrative, her research travels to the American South, Berlin and New Delhi are intercut with reconstructions of historical events.

Work is her healing process following the deaths of her husband (Jon Bernthal), mother (Emily Yancy) and cousin (Niecy Nash), tragically all within a year.

Ellis-Taylor was also in DuVernay’s Netflix series When They See Us (2019) and an Oscar nominee for King Richard (2021). The actress is tremendous, plumbing the depths of Wilkerson’s grief.

The intimate family scenes are ironically the most convincing in a movie that aspires to big ideas. Caste, Wilkerson concludes, is the system of oppression across generations and continents.

Far be it from me to question what seems to be the reductionism of a Pulitzer Prize winner.

DuVernay does not either. Her adaptation is admirably ambitious, but the didacticism stymies any critical discussion of the polemics – much less the overlooked socio-political complexities.

Hot take: A ground-breaking social study gets a screen exposition. Viewers will be swayed by Ellis-Taylor’s performance and the moral purpose, if not the thesis.