A definitive ranking of the 100 greatest movie hitmen, by how good they are at their job

polygon.com:

One of the first big surprises of Richard Linklater’s surprising new film Hit Man, now streaming on Netflix, is its early dispelling of the film’s titular, fictional profession. Linklater loops up a brief cinematic essay, showing us the history of almost a century of Hollywood hitmen and how the idea wove itself into the American mythos. Meanwhile, Glen Powell — as the film’s protagonist — explains that the idea is a silly fantasy. There aren’t any real people whose job is waiting around for you to find them on the internet and offer them a few thousands dollars to make your problems disappear in some remote marsh.

And yet the idea of the hitman persists. It’s the romantic fantasy of a lone gun, living parasitically off the drama of life, love, hate, sex, and death. The dramatic possibilities are endless. In the hitman, we have our most overt metaphor for capitalism: an independent contractor, often doing the unpleasant work of large corporate enterprises (illicit or legitimate), who makes their living reluctantly and at the direct expense of others. As the idea of the hitman has evolved and been fleshed out by generations of screenwriters and directors, the job has been utilized as a metaphor: for legacies of trauma, the staleness of the American Dream, our soulless, conveyor-belt economy, the aspiration to achieve perfect discipline and the imperfect humanity that makes this aspiration folly, the questions of determinism, fate, chance, and our free will — and even as a metaphor for filmmaking itself.

But, perhaps far more importantly, hitmen are fucking cool. They’re hot, smart, dangerous, rich, suave killers, often played by our hottest and coolest stars at the apexes of their hotness and coolness. Their movies are usually fun summer blockbusters full of sex, murder, great outfits, and exotic locales, with dense plots you can invest as much or as little as you’d like in. Find me a person who doesn’t love a good hitman flick and I will show you a joyless bore.

S