"Hit Man" (2023)

Hit Man is a sly and funny film, but beneath its charm lies something unsettling. Gary Johnson begins as a timid professor who moonlights as a fake hitman for the police, playing dress-up to catch people who want someone dead. At first, the persona is a performance, a way of doing a job. Yet soon Gary discovers that the invented character, suave and fearless, feels more real than the ordinary man he has always been. He does not just pretend to be someone else, he feels liberated by it. The line between mask and identity dissolves. Here the film intersects almost perfectly with what Carl Trueman has called expressive individualism, the belief that the authentic self is found not in given structures or moral laws but in self-expression and self-invention. To be free is to be who you imagine yourself to be.

But there is a cost. Gary’s new persona, Ron, is not just more confident. He is also more reckless, more dangerous, more willing to bend the rules. Gary finds love while inhabiting the mask, yet this love is founded on deception. He tastes confidence in his classroom, but it is fueled by a role-play. The man who once hesitated over rules of right and wrong now bends those rules until they snap. By the film’s end, Gary has not simply chosen a new way of being. He has lost his ethical core altogether, deciding that the life of the mask is better than the life of truth.

This is where Hit Man becomes more than a quirky comedy. It exposes the fragility of a morality built on self-expression. When identity is no longer given but constructed, ethics become negotiable, malleable, a matter of convenience. If the self is a role we write for ourselves, then right and wrong become props on a stage rather than enduring realities. Gary believes he is free, but in reality he is enslaved to a fiction, one that erodes his integrity with every passing moment.

Theologically, this is the danger of expressive individualism stripped bare. The Bible tells us that the self is not invented but received, created in the image of God with a calling to reflect His truth and goodness. Of course we grow, we mature, we learn, and we become more fully ourselves over time. Yet growth is not the same thing as reinvention. The modern creed of individualism tempts us to discard givenness altogether, to build ourselves from scratch based on feelings, whims, and more subtly, on what the surrounding culture whispers to us. We think we are self-made, but in reality we are still shaped and controlled by forces beyond us: by society, by mass opinion, by advertising, by whatever scripts the culture is selling at the moment. That is far scarier than the world held in the hands of a loving God. Gary’s fall in Hit Man is not the fall of a monster but of an ordinary man who believed freedom meant reinvention. What he discovered too late is that the mask he built did not set him free, it simply bound him to a lie.