Richard Linklater has been making feature films for over thirty years, and from the beginning the writer/director has shown a predilection for having his characters wax philosophically on the nature of our existence as humans. So, it should come as no surprise when Linklater’s most recent film, Hit Man, opens with a professor enthusiastically quoting Nietzsche to his students:

“The secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves!”

The idea, a student surmises, is to live life with abandon; to pursue one’s passions, even if it means living dangerously. Except the professor doesn’t live this way, which brings in a second philosophical issue: can people change? In many ways, Linklater’s film—where Professor Gary Johnson poses as a fake hit man for the New Orleans police—is an examination of these two ideas, via a genre mash-up of screwball comedy, edgy rom-com, and film noir. Should we live dangerously and can we change ourselves to get there?

Something else Linklater has come back to regularly in his career: he questions the rules, has his characters press up against the edges of things and see whether there’s any there there. And this draws out a third question: if we answer ‘yes’ to the first two questions, then how can we make it happen? What is the cost?

On this point of questioning the rules, I am reminded of Linklater’s best work: the Before trilogy. In each case, Jesse and Celine question the rules. Can two strangers spend one night in Vienna and build a meaningful and lasting connection? When Jesse and Celine reconnect in the second film, what role does Jesse’s marriage play in the continuation (or not) of their relationship? And in the third film, does their marriage bind them in any way going forward?

In Hit Man, the genre mash-up is one way of testing the rules: by bringing these genres together, which genre rules predominate? Screwball says anything goes. Romance says guy gets girl. Noir says there will be justice. Or maybe the mash-up means there are new rules that need to be discovered? Linklater and his co-writer Powell take the story in strikingly strange directions: In the first act, Powell’s professor leans way into his fake hit man persona, researching his “clients” and becoming the hit man character they “need”—screwball. In act 2, the professor/hit man falls for one of these “clients,” getting himself entangled in a surreptitious and steamy romance with a woman who tried to hire him to kill her husband. Act 3 draws in the noirish elements alongside the screwball and romance, as the two protagonists find the world of rules and justice closing in on them, until it doesn’t.

It’s this last bit that makes the film such a puzzle. Up to the third act, the movie breezes along, light and airy. And the movie at least plays like we should live dangerously and we can change who we are. However, when the bodies start dropping and the protagonists get away scot-free, one cannot help but question what Linklater is up to, question the cost that these characters have to bear to find, in Nietzsche’s words, their “greatest enjoyment.” There are probably more ways to take the conclusion, but I can think of three major options:

• Played straight, this is a comedy about people who kill the problem people in their lives, get away with it, and live happily ever after. This is living dangerously to the fullest. There are no absolutes (and therefore, no justice).
• A second version is slightly different than the first: this, too, is a comedy. It recognizes some limits and lines, but if there is justice here, it is individually determined.
• A third version makes what appears to be a comedy into an abject tragedy: here we take the ending, which unfolds in the future, in a completely ironic way, seeing the protagonists entirely as anti-heroes who have bought into their fantasy world and will play pretend in their community and even with their children for the rest of their lives (or as long as they can).

None of these readings is entirely satisfying—the first because it is basically amoral and a nonsensical way of being in the world; the second because it seeks to define morality only individually, which runs into major problems once you realize you necessarily live in relationship with others; and the third because its tragedy is deeply painful given the now-involvement of children.

Based on what unfolds in the movie, I am inclined to advocate for the third view as the most sensible reading, based on an exchange repeated three times in the film: “How’s the pie?” “All pie is good pie.” The first two times this phrase shows up, it indicates an entrance into a fantasy world, where Johnson is a hit man and the person asking him the question is going to hire him for a job that will never take place. When Linklater brings this back for the final scene, it indicates that Madison and Gary, now married with children, remain ensconced in a fantasy—this time them married with two kids. They are as disconnected from reality as they have ever been, doomed to live as actors and never revealing their true selves. The problem is, outside of that line, nothing in the film really points toward a tragic tone—everything is in a comic register.

Whichever way we take the ending, something about this project feels off. Whether it’s the moral logic, the tone, a combination of both, or something else entirely, I am left seeing Hit Man as a confused, albeit interesting, failure. So, while it is certainly true that “All pie is good pie,” Hit Man tells me that Linklater’s filmmaking instincts, close to pie as they might be, are undercooked here.