---
title: Hit Man
type: Movie
date: 2024-06-09
rating: 7
year: 2024
director: Richard Linklater
status: Finished
image: hit-man.jpeg
tags:
  - movie
colorSortKey: [0, 125, 7]
---
 It's fascinating to see that this is a Richard Linklater (of [[Everybody Wants Some!!]] and [[Before Sunrise]]) fame, as this feels in many ways so much _more_ like a Lord & Miller production (or, more charitably, a lesser Coen work).

And, indeed, you can see Linklater take his foot off the gas and lean a bit into the "ehh, this is a Netflix paycheck" of it all: the hackneyed philosophy lectures, the bizarre suspension of disbelief required for most of the sting operations. But it's also a deeply _entertaining_ film: the conceit is immediately delightful and interesting, Glen Powell acts his ass off, and the runtime knows that there's no room (or need) for unnecessary padding (unlike, say, [[The Fall Guy]]).

I'd argue that this is not a particularly good Linklater movie — I think he is most interesting when he is using cinema to express his feeling about the beauty and depth of seemingly-anodyne humanity, and this is him ignoring all that and deciding that it would be fun to make a rom-com. But it is a _deeply good_ Netflix movie, and a perfect answer for "what's a fun, perfectly-delivered way to spend two hours?"