Monday new releases: 24 June 2024

Hit Man is on Netflix and The Road to Patagonia and Despicable Me 4 are in cinemas

Mark Cousins is one of the smarter people in the film world and this post on X (formerly Twitter) is a good example of getting straight to the point:

I have my own version of that rule: remember to review the film you are watching, not what you think it should have been. Stay in the moment and try and connect to a filmmaker’s intentions rather than your own preferences or taste.

The three questions I try and remember to ask when reviewing are these:

• What is the film trying to say?

• How well does it say it?

• Was it worth saying in the first place?

I’m mostly good at doing that, I think, but recently found myself responding negatively to a film because of the noise around it, rather than taking it on its own terms.

That film is Richard Linklater’s Hit Man which received a great response at its Venice premiere in June last year – evidently it was a real crowd-pleaser with predictions that it would be a hit with audiences looking for an adult-orientated comedy. It’s the kind of film – mid-sized, sexy, surprising – that has been thin on the ground lately.

Then it was bought by Netflix, with their spotty relationship with putting their films in cinemas. This annoyed people who believed that it would work better with crowds than at home, and that bypassing a decent cinema release was doing the film a disservice.

So, by the time the film dropped a couple of weeks ago, I was – as a fan of Linklater and of grown-up comedy-thrillers generally – fairly well primed to enjoy it. Then, when it failed to blow me away the disappointment was that much greater.

My wife, however, enjoyed it a lot. “It’s very entertaining, what’s your problem?” she said as I hemmed and hawed afterwards. “It wasn’t the film I’d been promised,” I said, which really meant it wasn’t the film that I wanted.

The gap between hope and reality is clearly my problem not the film’s, so I’ve spent a few days trying to wrestle with the reality of it and work out why I didn’t enjoy it as much as other people.

My first – and biggest – problem is Glen Powell as psychology professor and undercover New Orleans police consultant Gary Johnson. I do not buy what Powell is selling and haven’t since he moved out of the ranks of the supporting players – where he was mostly forgettable – to movie star. Someone – not least Powell himself – is working very hard to make him a very big thing but I sense the calculation of it all and find myself resisting.

There’s a self-consciousness here and just putting him in different wig and costumes – he masquerades as different killers for hire in order to entrap those that would seek their services – doesn’t turn him into Peter Sellers.

His on-screen sparring partner is much better. Adria Arjona plays a prospective client who Johnson falls for and she’s a live wire – unpredictable and in the moment.

Anyway, maybe my response was conditioned by Netflix prejudice – I have had some very average experiences with their films – and if I had seen Hit Man with a packed, excited, festival audience I might have enjoyed it more. But, on a Saturday night on the couch, it was decent enough entertainment but not the answer to anyone’s prayers.

No expectations is the best way to enjoy the Australian documentary, The Road to Patagonia. It starts with a car crash that grabs you by the lapels and demands that you pay attention. Once it has that attention, it becomes multiple different films over the 90-minute running time: a travel documentary, surf movie, love story, anthropological study, spiritual journey, ecological treatise and campaign for conservation. Amazingly, it does all of those things really well.

Matty Hannon is an explorer – in more ways than one. Realising that a dead end desk job in Melbourne was giving him depression and anxiety, he decides to sell everything he owns and go and find himself on an epic journey to experience the best surf breaks on the Pacific coast of the Americas, from Alaska in the north to the southern tip of Latin America in Patagonia.