INSIDE JOB-"Hit Man"

Years before Hannah Arendt coined, in the pages of this magazine, the phrase "the banality of evil," popular films and fiction were embodying that idea in the character of the hit man. In classic crime movies such as "This Gun for Hire" (1942) and "Murder by Contract" (1958), hit men figure much as Nazis do in political movies, as symbols of abstract evil.

- RICHARD BRODY

The hired gunman in Ernest Hemingway’s 1927 short story “The Killers”—who, when asked “What’s the idea?,” answers, “There isn’t any idea”—is a primordial counterpart to the guard in Auschwitz who told the inmate Primo Levi, “Here there is no why.” Instead of filling in these blanks, filmmakers have tended to welcome them. Thus, like the movie Nazi, the hit man has become so emptied of substance as to be, with rare exceptions, a ponderous cliché—a deadly bore.

A prime virtue of Richard Linklater’s new film, “Hit Man,” is that it features no hit man. Rather, it’s centered on a character who portrays a hit man—an actor, in a sense, albeit one whose masquerade has nothing to do with entertainment. Linklater, faced with a plethora of precursors and stereotypes, leans into them with a diabolically smart yarn about illusion and imagination—less the psychology of the hit man than the psychology of the myth of the hit man. His comedic approach gets deeper into the archetype, by way of mere talk about violence, than many similar movies do with the grim depiction of gore. What’s more, the film is also a romantic comedy, among the cleverest and most resonant recent examples of the genre.

“Hit Man” is loosely based on a true story: a 2001 report in