David Davis 45, part 3

and so we return to the sex scene

Back in January, I began writing a series on the sex scene, which was promptly sidelined after I began another series on how to vet sadists, dominants, and tops. I don’t like to work out of order (though though two series did have some overlap), but hey—when the spirit calls, you gotta listen.

With my vetting guide finally complete, I can now return to writing about how sex onscreen and in literature is not just accomplished by the artists, but received by the audience. Which isn’t to say that the sex scene has ever lost my attention—I’m into it, famously! But my memory did have to be jogged, and by a surprising bit of media: Richard Linklater’s Hit Man, which came out last year to what Wikipedia is telling me was critical acclaim¹.

Acclaimed or not, I agree with the reviewer for Bright Wall, Dark Room, who found Hit Man—the story of romantic loser falling in love with a suspect while on duty as a Mrs. Doubtfire-style sting operator for the NOPD—to be thematically noncommittal, poorly written (in terms of dialogue), and badly lit, a tragedy considering the extreme physical beauty of its stars. Though leading man Glen Powell is undeniably charismatic, he has yet to live up his dynamite turn as ur-bro Chad Radwell in Ryan Murphy’s Scream Queens, much less to the Tom Cruise comparisons, which I maintain are the collision of proximity with the lack of a clear heir to His Impossibleness, who turned 62 this week.

Indeed, Powell’s sexual chemistry with love interest Adria Arjona is one of Hit Man’s few strengths, which I bring up because—shocker—it’s on display in more than one halfway decent sex scene, which is all the more remarkable in a movie that’s too politically wishy-washy to even be called conservative.

Though it promised laughs, “Hit Man” was also not funny, except for the 15 seconds when Powell freaked this Tennesee Williams meets Andy Warhol meets Fassbender in Fincher’s “The Killer” (2023) persona, which sent me. Where is her movie!

Now, I don’t recall either actor revealing anything in the bathing-suit zone, and there’s definitely nothing sexually outré, other than the implication of cunnilingus, which depending on your moral panic can definitely pose a problem for us sex scene absolutists. But neither is Hit Man cutting away at the kiss, compartmentalizing sexual content to be cut for international markets (at least, I don’t think it is), or compensating for its relative sexual laxity by throwing in a real pervert for the shock value, though it certainly had the opportunity to, what with Powell’s extended dress-up scenes just begging for a read from one of these gender academics.

As dull as I found it, Hit Man is, or at least aspires to be, a movie for grown-ups, engaging with grown-up preoccupations—like workplace ethics and identity—and depicting grown-up activities—like police entrapment and extramarital sex. And I guess that’s something, isn’t it? Neither particularly reactionary nor aspiring to the vanguard, its refusal to say or do anything is almost refreshing in its nothingness. While failing to deliver on its marketing as a sexy, rompy, throwback to the action movies I grew up on, the ones that Trojan horsed romance with guns, titties, and light patriotism, Hit Man’s absence was so comforting that it almost pushed it over the finish line, anyway. There’s no there there, but isn’t that what we’re getting out of the elevated binge fodder of The Bear and Brat and whatever else we’re using to distract ourselves from everything?

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1. Not to be confused with the Plasmatics song.