Hit Man (2024)

Richard Linklater's Hit Man arrives dressed as a breezy romantic crime comedy and delivers, mostly, exactly that. Glen Powell plays Gary Johnson, a psychology and philosophy professor in New Orleans who moonlights for the police, impersonating contract killers in sting operations. He is good at it. Too good. When he invents the cool, dangerous persona of Ron to charm a would-be client named Madison, the performance bleeds into his actual life, and the film becomes a study of a man dissolving into his own disguises. The premise is lifted loosely from a 2001 Texas Monthly article about a real Houston professor who did similar work, though the film openly invents most of what follows, including a murder, a blackmail scheme, and a tidy domestic ending. It is charming, well-acted, and entirely uninterested in instructing anyone about anything.

That last quality is worth defending. The ensemble includes Retta, Sanjay Rao, and the excellent Adria Arjona, and their presence registers as ordinary life, not as a statement. Race is never addressed. Madison, played by Arjona, escapes an abusive husband and turns the tables on a blackmailer, and the film grants her real cunning, but it frames this as noir plotting, not as a thesis. There is no environmental sermon, no class warfare, no commentary on body image, no neurodivergent reading of Gary's mildness. What philosophical weight the film carries arrives through Gary's classroom lectures, which double as the movie's thematic exposition. A few critics found those lectures overly obvious. They are.

The result is a film with almost no social agenda and no interest in acquiring one. Its cultural awareness is faint, incidental, and never foregrounded. A pleasant evening, and a light ledger.