In the movie, Glen Powell stars as Gary Johnson, a psychology and philosophy professor who works undercover as a fake hitman to assist the police with their sting operations. Gary is so dedicated to his secret gigs that he carefully researches each suspect and adopts unique personas for each one. Unfortunately for him, things get rather complicated when he's tasked with soliciting a confession from a very attractive married woman who wants her husband killed.
Although it certainly falls under the rom-com umbrella, Hit Man, will make you feel like you're watching an action thriller one moment and a screwball comedy the next. Director Richard Linklater told Tudum, “I think that’s an attribute of the movie—it’s about a lot of things. It’s about identity and self and passion. But on a plot level, it’s just a guy who gets in a little too deep. His passions lead him in a direction where he’s deceiving someone he’s in love with, and being someone else. They have to deal with those repercussions.”
Linklater also discussed how the film challenges the idea that professional hit men are easy to find in real life. He explained, “They don’t exist at the retail level, and they’d be so easy to entrap and arrest. Regardless, the average, aware, intelligent person goes through life thinking [hit men] are real…The notion that someone you’ve never met, who’s this icy professional you meet for five minutes, is going to risk the death penalty—I think as a culture we enjoy believing in it.”
He added, “The fantasy of a hit man occupies a place in our brain because it feels like a simple solution to life’s complicated problems.”
