Hit Man

It’s summer-movie season. In the not-too-distant past, that meant an action movie, an animated flick, and a new studio comedy every couple of weeks. As of late, this kind of seasonal fare only exists in fragments of its former self. Before pushing up the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia any further, it’s worth saying: Not all of these summer movies were noteworthy. In fact, a not insignificant amount of them were downright bad. As with Christmastime, however, there was a certain pleasure to be found in the festiveness of it all. Even if you didn’t personally celebrate the commercial holiday — or, for the sake of this argument, had no interest in rolling out for, say, Grown Ups 2 (2013) or Divergent (2014) — it was nice to know there was a little something of everything out there for those who did.

Hit Man — snatched up by Netflix after a brief tour of the festival circuit in September 2023, then held from the general public for nine months — would have fit quite nicely in one of those summer-movie slots. Glen Powell stars as Gary: a boring, lonely professor at the University of New Orleans who spends his free time tinkering with tech to assist local police with their undercover operations. When Jasper (Austin Amelio), the department’s most valuable player, finds himself on paid leave for unnecessary roughness toward some area teens, Gary is recruited to step into his shoes and play the disgraced cop’s undercover persona, a contract killer. It turns out that all the psychology talk in the classroom isn’t for naught. Thanks to his understanding of people and what makes them tick, Gary is exceptionally skilled at goading suspects into confessing their criminal intentions to kill by proxy.

While Jasper’s away, Gary gets to play. Taking what he knows about his targets, he’s able to craft the perfect persona to put them at ease and convince them he’s the hit man to trust. Just when he’s on a roll, he meets Maddy (Adria Arjona), a desperate housewife looking for a way out from under her abusive husband (Evan Holtzman). Right from the jump, Gary can tell this one’s different. Breaking the rules, he — as tough guy Ron, who looks an awful lot like regular ol’ Glen Powell — stops the woman before she can incriminate herself and instead encourages her to take the money and run. Leave home. Start a new life. Never look back. The problem? He can’t seem to take his own advice. He continues to see Maddy disguised as Ron, further muddying the waters of this already treacherous territory. The longer Gary tries to juggle these diametrically opposed selves, the harder it becomes to keep from slipping up. 

Fans of Linklater’s excellent crime comedy Bernie (2011) will be happy to hear that Hit Man is also based on an old Texas Monthly article by Skip Hollandsworth. The films have a very similar sense of humor, effortlessly making light of a story that’s actually rather dark. Its low-budget feel is also reminiscent of earlier Linklater works (though this is surely a matter of necessity and not so much a conscious aesthetic choice). Even the inclusion of Powell hearkens back to the pair’s earlier collaborations, dating back to Fast Food Nation (2006). Glen-as-Gary-as-Ron pairs exquisitely with Arjona, the two easily bringing the proper amount of chemistry and charm to make it all convincing. In no uncertain terms, it’s a ready-made Linklater classic. (It would play great in front of an audience, too, but alas.)

Despite what you might’ve assumed, Linklater hasn’t been lying low as of late. He’s been no less active than ever, just a lot less visible. It’s been a decade since his audacious coming-of-age epic Boyhood (2014), which means it’s been 10 years since the man has enjoyed a proper theatrical rollout. After the crowd-pleaser-without-a-crowd that was Everybody Wants Some!! (2016), the Texan writer-director was sentenced to a fate so many of his indie generation have faced: an indefinite probationary period under the auspices of the streaming services. Fingerprint-free for-hire gig Where’d You Go, Bernadette (2019) aside, Linklater’s been similarly hard to find: his spiritual Hal Ashby tribute Last Flag Flying (2017) went to Prime Video after hitting a handful of theaters, while his animated auto-fiction Apollo 10 1/2 (2022) was quietly launched on Netflix.

It doesn’t come as a shock, then, to see Hit Man relegated to a similar fate: a short and limited theatrical run, then off to a streaming platform for the long haul. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt, though. Sure, it’s better than nothing, but why even try to qualify it when it’s getting increasingly difficult to see any good in the way these streamers treat their talent? Just last year, Glen Powell vehicle Anyone But You (2023) — a mediocre rom-com light on both rom and com — reached nearly a quarter-billion at the multiplex. Not to foolishly suggest Linklater’s latest could pull those kinds of numbers, especially when Hit Man lacks the on-set cheating controversy with co-star Sydney Sweeney that made that film viral on arrival, but c’mon: It’s painful to see Netflix snatch this one from its 2023 festival premiere and stifle what could have been a good, fun run.

In another world, this is playing at your local AMC this summer, sandwiched in the auditorium between the latest Adam Sandler hangout romp and a mid-series dystopian YA book adaptation. The classic Linklater dialogue would be occasionally muffled by thumping ’80s rock from your left and booming blockbuster explosions from the right. For now, we’ll all just have to continue coping with our current reality where mid-budget features are a thing for the internet, not the cinema.

One day, maybe this American-independent icon will find his way back to those wide releases he deserves (regardless of what those meaningless metrics like “box office gross” or “number of hours viewed” have to say). Or maybe he won’t. In a reality where it’s apparently too lofty to hope for any relief from the doldrums of our current system, perhaps the bar is better set lower. At this point, all one can do is throw their hands up, think back on what it used to be like to see a pretty good movie at a pretty nice theater on a pretty average day, and — if we’re lucky — hope we all can get back to that eventually. There’s nowhere to go but up.