职业杀手

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原名：Hit Man又名：当杀手恋爱时(台) / 情迷假杀手 / 杀手 / Hitman‎

分类：喜剧 / 动作 / 爱情 / 犯罪 / 地区：美国年份：2023

简介：荣获奥斯卡金像奖提名的导演理查德·林克莱特执导的这部光鲜亮丽的新黑色影片由格伦·

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更新时间:2024-07-08

职业杀手影评：[Film Review] Bernie (2011) and Hit Man (2023)

Two Richard Linklater's films based on author/journalist Slip Hollandsworth's nonfiction articles about real-life stories that are infinitely stranger than fiction.

BERNIE is based on the 1996 murder of 81-year-old millionaire Marjorie Nugent (MacLaine) at the hands of her 39-year-old companion Bernie Tiede (Black) in Carthage, Texas. Posing as a faux-documentary, the film convenes the actual townsfolk to sound off the notorious case and the consensus is somehow unnerving. Everyone agrees that Marjorie is a noisome harpy while Bernie is the salt of the earth who is impeccably charming (that is a big red flag!). They even manage to sanctimoniously tolerate the presumption of his queer orientation. There is oceanic incredibility for them to accept the fact that Bernie could be a killer.

Since the film is titled “Bernie”, and the real Bernie even procured a temporary release from prison from 2014 to 2016, staying at Linklater’s garage apartment, before resentenced to 99 years to life, it is self-evident that objectivity isn’t Linklater’s holy grail here. As Bernie is the one who gets to tell his side of the story, and for want of a strong voice from Marjorie’s perspective, we must take the “truth” with a pinch of salt.

Curiously, Bernie is a fascinating character, an assistant funeral director (his vocation might partially account for his amorality towards taking another person’s life and his bizarre corpse preservation) who appears devout, gregarious, even altruistic (doling out Marjorie’s money to those who are needy). His abrupt offing of his meal ticket is shown as a worm-will-turn, impulsive act out of the spite towards Marjorie’s high-handed possessiveness. What really piques a viewer’s interest is in the aftermath. Bernie seems to have no intention to dispose the body and simply plays along with no overt concerns about its grave consequences. What was he thinking then? This is the key question Linklater’s film fails to answer. He had the real Bernie at his disposal yet he pulls punches.

Be that as it may, Black is a real hoot and a half, projecting a faint exasperation out of Bernie’s goody-goody innocuousness, singing and playacting with his usual chops. MacLaine strains to squeeze some nuances to Marjorie’s grumpy crust, but the script doesn’t care to make her even remotely sympathetic. As for McConaughey, playing Danny, the local district attorney, is well in his wheelhouse to balance the optics of the crime.

12 years later, HIT MAN is inspired by the fact that a college professor who worked for the Houston police as a fake hired gun to operate on murder-for-hire entrapments in the late 1980s and 1990s. The film is relocated to New Orleans. Gary Johnson (Powell, who also contributes to the script), delights in his new-found appeal and confidence as a fake hit man in the local police’s undercover sting operations, which is the antithesis of his usual donnish bearings as a college professor.

Perfecting and ringing the changes of his disguises in both appearances and comportments, Gary is on a winning streak to lure suspects into lawful apprehension. Yet, one time, facing a gorgeous thing like Madison (Arjona), a young woman trapped with her abusive husband, Gary chooses to let her off the hook and the two become an item, naturally. Only, to Madison, Gary is the charismatic hit man Ron. Their swooning romance hits a stumbling block when Madison’s husband Ray (Holtzman) is found shot dead and Madison is the prime suspect. Swamped in falsehood, double-cross and blackmail, the pair must take their future in their own hands, and Linklater imagineers an ingenious way to leave them out of harm’s way, and the human cruelty is embodied by no more than a plastic bag. In the mass, whoppers actually can be forgiven and a new life can be reconstructed to perfection.

Linklater always sees our world through a rose-colored glass, even in the treacherous water. However it is also plain to see the story between Gary and Madison is purely fabricated with tired tropes: a violent husband who happens to be a druggie and leaves a sizable insurance benefiting his soon-to-be ex-wife; the brazen bad cop (Amelio, a cracking foil you don’t want to be pally with) is too inane to put his own safety into consideration, we are talking about blackmail a murderer for christ’s sake!

Better acknowledged as a rom-com with a cloak-and-dagger streak than a noir-tinged confidence game that debates morality, HIT MAN is low on adrenaline rush (which cravenly precludes it to be released as a mainstream player in the cinema, it is acquired by Netflix) but high on comedy of situations (it is an echt crowd-pleaser). It is also characteristic of Linklater’s wordy pensées, aperçus or quips on life at large. For example, the elucidation of id, ego and superego is a boon to understand the duality between Gary and his alter ego. And Powell is excellently laidback amid the fracas, a cool guy with more than enough charisma to spare (the next Hollywood leading man that fits the more masculine bracket). Arjona, as his partner in crime, is also wonderful as the default female fatale but with a twist, her deception is secondary to her spontaneous rapport with Powell, and the scene where they outfox the eavesdropping police is an ebulliently orchestrated pas de Deux, among the best among Linklater’s career. That is no small feat.

Never a fatalist, both BERNIE and HIT MAN consolidate Linklater’s sunny-side-up beneficence that has become rarer as our world is on the maddening trajectory to self-destruction. It is so precious to find life-affirming positiveness in horrific murders, and to his credit, Linklater has been able to crack such a tough nut with a tip-top light touch.

referential entries: Linklater's BOYHOOD (2014, 8.1/10); EVERYBODY WANT SOME!! (2016, 6.2/10); BEFORE MIDNIGHT (2013, 8.6/10).