Hit Man's Big Flaw
Glen Powell's star vehicle resurrects a decades-old trope for the film's female lead.
In today’s issue of Back Row:
Guest contributor and screenwriter Laura Hooper Beck on the most disappointing thing about Glen Powell star vehicle Hit Man.
How Powell’s rise fits perfectly with Hollywood’s “men are back” era.
Loose Threads by Amy Odell, including Shein’s IPO, Paolo Roversi on selfies, and my new TikTok addiction.
A note to readers: Today, I’m pleased to publish a guest post by one of my favorite writers, Laura Hooper Beck. After reading the reviews for the Netflix movie Hit Man, I made haste to watch it. It feels so rare that movies come along in the streaming era that are both mass and critically adored. While I enjoyed watching Hit Man, I found one aspect of it terribly disappointing. I asked Laura, a Los Angeles-based screenwriter, if she agreed, and she did. Ahead, she brilliantly articulates our shared beef with this movie.
***Warning: this story contains spoilers for Hit Man.***
Hit Man's Big Flaw
By Laura Hooper Beck
Richard Linklater’s Hit Man is an enjoyable Netflix flick about a college professor who has a side gig pretending to be a hit man to entrap would-be murderers. It’s a critical darling. Peter Travers calls it “one of the best movies of the year,” and the AV Club writes that it’s “a slick, sexy comedy-noir that will actually get at-home viewers to engage with media outside of the dreaded algorithm.”
He’s right: the movie is also an audience hit, with a 93 percent audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Most of the love in these reviews goes to the lead, Glen Powell, with Travers writing, “Hollywood historians may try to pinpoint the precise moment when Powell became a movie star,” and Max Weiss writing in Baltimore Magazine, “It’s a delightful film, nearly perfect on its own terms, and it’s an important one, too — it made me a Glen Powell believer.” Josh Larsen writes that the film feels “fashioned for Powell to make a play to be the next Brad Pitt.”
Hit Man is meant to be a breakthrough role for Powell, comparable to how Top Gun propelled Tom Cruise to stardom or Good Will Hunting made Matt Damon a household name. However, Powell and Linklater — who co-wrote the screenplay — appear to have overlooked the female lead, Maddy Masters, played by Adria Arjona.
Arjona is a talented actress and does as much as she can with limited material, but her character is, to put it kindly, flimsy. She’s under-written and poorly drawn, and essentially — and I hate to even type this! — a modern-day manic pixie dream girl. Manic pixie dream girls had their on-screen heyday in the mid- to late-aughts but they’re essentially whimsical, free-spirited, beautiful, entirely fictional creatures who exist to teach male leads how to be free and truly live. The term has been beaten to death (it even has its own Wikipedia entry), which is what makes seeing it as an on-screen trope in 2024 even more frustrating. I thought we were over this shit! But Maddy Masters checks all the boxes: She lacks depth, exists solely to support the male lead's story, and is reduced to fuckability.
Maddy always wears something hot and sexy, whether it makes sense in the scene or not, and usually does the perfect thing to move the plot along while having little character or agency of her own. She tries to hire someone to kill her cruel husband, gets talked out of it by the charming and complex Powell character, leaves her marriage, and moves into a beautiful, perfectly decorated house. (Which she pays for how? No job is ever even mentioned!) From that point on, Maddy's sole purpose seems to be standing in her kitchen, waiting for Powell's character to show up so they can sleep together. Once, when he shows up, she’s wearing a sexy flight attendant costume.
And that’s pretty much it. It’s not a terrible life, but it’s also not a real one.
Where are her friends? What is her job? What does she do in her free time besides buy a gun? Once, she volunteers at a puppy adoption event wearing a silk mini. Nobody who has ever volunteered at a dog adoption event has ever worn silk because you will get shit on yourself at least once that day. I speak from experience! If you’re not wearing old sweatpants and a stained 5K T-shirt at a dog adoption event, you are doing it wrong!
This phenomenon is hardly new or unique to Hit Man. Maddy brings to mind Francesca (Alessandra Mastronardi) from Master of None — another woman character written by a man, Aziz Ansari. Again, Ansari plays the complex male lead Dev, who just happens to stumble across the effortlessly gorgeous Francesca in Italy. She is somehow readily available to hang out with Ansari, and is so drawn to him that, after they part ways and she gets engaged to someone else, she considers uprooting her life in Italy to move to New York just for Ansari. At one point, Ansari’s character writes a list of pros and cons about their relationship. It includes things like how Francesca is "magical," "beautiful," and "makes you feel something." Again, she is a dream woman one would strain to find in the real world who exists to satisfy the needs and ego of the male lead.
Unfortunately, this reductive treatment is not limited to these two examples, but emblematic of a more systemic issue plaguing storytelling across mediums.
Powell's character is as layered as a crepe cake: he's a professor who takes on a dozen different personas as a pretend hit man working for the cops, giving Powell more than 12 roles in one movie to work with as an actor. Arjona’s character believes he is his hit man character, so Powell flips between his professor persona and his hit man persona. To be fair, he does it well. Meanwhile, Arjona's role feels like an amuse-bouche. It's as though the male writers spent all their time and money crafting a complex protagonist, and then ran out before they could do the same for the female “lead.” Arjona ends up as the "hot and fun" archetype who exists mostly to satisfy Powell's character sexually. She also has the convenient ability to move the plot along by killing her ex. Which I would say was out of character, but she has no character, so maybe she’s a sociopath and the movie just never fully explores that? Honestly, that would be more interesting!
The crux of the issue isn’t that men like Powell and Linklater are evil and bad, but just that men are disproportionately the ones writing the stories.
In 2023, just 25 percent of movie writers in the United States were women — which was actually a slight decrease from the year before. When the storytelling landscape lacks diverse voices, shallow, stereotypical representations of those outside the writer's immediate frame of reference continue to end up on screen. And I know — we’re all getting tired of reading about this, and I’m sure as hell getting tired of writing about it. But it’s not changing! And maybe it’s getting worse.
As a TV writer myself, men have given me disappointingly predictable notes on my women characters. I’ve been told they’re too bossy, too loud, and too much. I’ve been told to switch the genders to give the more complex role to a man. A male executive recently told a TV writer friend that she needed to flesh out her male character because “men are back.” THIS HAPPENED!
Powell's rise itself may be evidence of this thinking: part of his appeal, the media tells us, is good old-fashioned, Yellowstone-flavored machismo — or, as one executive told the New York Times, "red meat for red states."
Powell himself is being publicized as if he’s the second coming. And I like him! He is a good actor! But in that recent New York Times profile, Brooks Barnes writes, “Powell has a sharp mind for business, and, at least for now, box office dollars motivate him more than awards. He has also acquired a bit more ruggedness with age, making him a more credible leading man.” Is this an amazing or unique quality? He likes money and wants to make more? Can you imagine an actress receiving so much praise for being commercial and older? I can’t, but I sure would love to see it!
This fawning tone and eagerness to praise mundane qualities in male leads stands in such stark contrast to the lack of dimensionality afforded to their women counterparts. The trope of the thinly written female love interest is nothing new but it’s a bummer to see it in the year of our Lord 2024.
Laura Hooper Beck is a writer living in Los Angeles. She was most recently a co-producer on the sitcom The Great North.
Loose Threads
By Amy Odell
After failing to win approval to list on the New York Stock Exchange, Shein will IPO in London. Human rights groups have alleged that Shein is using forced labor for its cotton supply in China, which the brand has denied. Florida Senator Marco Rubio is getting headlines for writing a letter to UK chancellor Jeremy Hunt urging them to reconsider owing to Shein’s labor practices in China.
Shein has increased prices by around one-third on some items in advance of its IPO, per Reuters.
Speaking of IPOs: Skims, which is reportedly planing to go public this year, is opening five physical stores in Georgetown, Washington D.C.; Aventura, FL; Austin, TX; Houston, TX; and Atlanta, GA. Skims Chief Commercial Officer Robert Norton told WWD, “Definitely over the next few years, we can support over 100 stores.” He may very well be low-balling — for reference, Victoria’s Secret has around eight times that in the U.S.
Kim Kardashian: “One fun fact… Every time I put on jewelry, I blow-dry it because I can’t stand putting on something freezing.”
Business of Fashion interviewed Paolo Roversi, and I don’t know, maybe he needs a podcast?? Quothe Roversi: “Selfies are to photography what shopping lists are to literature.”
My new social media addiction is TikToks by a home inspector who shows you how shitty newly constructed and flipped homes are.
After watching it, I was confused by all the praise that Hit Man had received. It was a fun, silly movie, but it was in no way ground breaking and I certainly didn't think it was laugh-out-loud funny. It felt like a movie I had seen before, and now after reading this article, I realize it was completely because of how the female lead was portrayed. The moment where she tells him that she is completely fine with him dictating exactly how the relationship should go, including coming and going whenever he pleases, never calling or taking her anywhere....yeah, sure, okay. This was the funniest part of the movie to me, but not in the way they intended.
I LOVED this...did not love Hit Man so much, but I do really question all the fanfare men get about their "ruggedness" and enthusiasm/eagerness for making more $$....these are precisely the things women get eviscerated for...