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Hit Man, a fall film-festival standout starring and cowritten by the meteorically-rising Glen Powell and directed by Richard Linklater, premieres on Netflix today after a brief theatrical run. Here are three reasons you need to watch it immediately.
Listen, I love a Richard Linklater movie with minimal plot. Two beautiful people with their natural teeth taking a long, winding walk and having a long, winding talk about the nature of love and life? A bunch of young-buck baseball players hanging out and crushing beers for two hours? Hell, I’d watch it for six. There’s a real satisfaction in letting yourself get swept away by the charming shagginess—and, of course, more than a little bit of nostalgia, since people other than Richard Linklater increasingly do not make ‘em like this anymore.
But Linklater fully locked in with a propulsive plot is just as satisfying (without losing an iota of charm). He and co-writer and star Glen Powell based their script on a Texas Monthly feature by Skip Hollandsworth about Gary Johnson, a supremely ordinary guy who stopped a slew of would-be killers while working as a fake undercover hit man for his local police department. The original story ends with him advising a young woman to walk away from her abusive husband instead of trying to have him killed. Hit Man moves the action to New Orleans and spins it off from there, imagining the trouble Johnson and that woman could get into if they’d fallen in love.
Some actors play coy about their desire to be movie stars, or claim to be outright disgusted with the idea. Not Glen Powell. Glen Powell wants to be a movie star, Glen Powell knows he was meant to be a movie star, and Glen Powell can’t believe you would just let a jawline like his go to waste.
While the success of Top Gun: Maverick and Anyone but You have reportedly made him the second-most bankable actor in Hollywood after Timothée Chalamet, Hit Man is the role that finally proves his mettle. (Linklater has a knack for pulling Powell’s best work out of him, beginning with his mustachioed-and-swaggering Everybody Wants Some!! performance.) In Hit Man, Powell gets to flex a bit, playing multiple undercover identities to zany perfection.
It helps that he has a great lead partner in Adria Arjona as Maddy, the woman looking to knock off her no-good husband. The pairing is unbelievably sexy, in a vintage screwball type of way. You can’t fake chemistry, and Powell and Arjona have enough spark to power a mid-sized American city.
To me, Powell seems increasingly like the Matthew McConaughey of his generation—though Linklater, who’s worked with them both, would beg to differ. “I know he shares the Texas thing, but Glen, his mind's wired very differently than Matthew. I mean, they're good-looking, hunky guys, for sure, but I don't really think about that too much,” he told me. “I think what you're really talking about is a kind of star charisma. That star quality that Glen has, Matthew has. They let you get away with a lot.”
I saw Hit Man in the fall, with an amped-up crowd at a packed film-festival screening, and couldn’t remember the last time I had so much fun at the movies; like a lot of people, I was bummed when it was announced that the movie would go straight to Netflix after a brief theatrical run. But when I asked Linklater about this in an interview, he was philosophical.
“Anyone could have picked it up. Netflix had the most passion for it. What can you say?” he said. “Believe me, if anyone would have said, ‘We think this can gross $100 million. Glen's a big star. We are going to put it in all these theaters…’ But no one made that offer, so the real question isn't to me. It's to all the distributors.”
On the other hand—you can just watch it! Right now! (It’s for sure a better option than Netflix’s other big release this week, about a big shark in the Seine terrorizing Paris.)
Plus, for what it’s worth, Linklater was pretty sanguine about the whole thing. “The reality is most films are seen ultimately, especially in the indie world, years later on video,” he said. “That's been my whole career … mostly when someone comes up to you and says they like your movie, they saw it at home.”