Hit Man - a Richard Linklater film

If I see a movie more delightful than “Hit Man” this year, I’ll be surprised. It’s the kind of romp people are talking about when they say that “they don’t make them like they used to”: It’s romantic, sexy, hilarious, satisfying and a genuine star-clinching turn for Glen Powell, who’s been having a moment for about two years now. It’s got the cheeky verve of a 1940s screwball rom-com in a thoroughly contemporary (and slightly racier) package. I’ve seen it twice, and a huge grin plastered itself across my face both times.

That’s why it’s a shame most people will see it at home — Netflix is barely giving it a theatrical release before it hits streaming even though it’s the sort of movie that begs for the experience of collective gut-splitting joy. Oh well. If you can see it in a theater, it’s worth it. If not, then get your friends together, pop some popcorn and settle in for a good old-fashioned movie for grown-ups.

The director Richard Linklater and Powell collaborated on the “Hit Man” script, which is loosely based on Skip Hollandsworth’s 2001 Texas Monthly article about Gary Johnson, a faux hit man who actually worked for the Houston Police Department. In the movie version, Gary (Powell) is a mild-mannered philosophy professor in New Orleans with a part-time side gig doing tech work for law enforcement. One day, he is accidentally pulled into pretending to be a hit man in a sting operation, and soon realizes he loves playing the role.

Or roles, really: The more Gary gets into it, the more he realizes that each person’s fantasy of a hit man is different, and he starts to dress up, preparing for the part before he meets with the client. (If this movie were solely constructed as a de facto reel demonstrating Powell’s range, it would work just fine.) Then, one day, pretending to be a sexy, confident hit man named Ron, he meets Madison (Adria Arjona, practically glowing from within), a put-upon housewife seeking his services. And everything changes for Gary.

A great deal of the enjoyment of “Hit Man” comes from simply witnessing Powell and Arjona’s white-hot chemistry. Seeing Powell transmogrify from nerdy Gary to five o’clock shadow Ron and back again is both hilarious and tantalizing, while Arjona has a big-eyed innocence crossed with wily smarts that keeps everyone, including Gary, guessing. Multiple layers of deception keep the movie from feeling formulaic — you’re always trying to keep track of who thinks what, and why. Eventually, when “Hit Man” morphs into a kind of caper comedy, part of the joy is rooting for characters as they make choices that are, at best, flexibly ethical. In doing so, we get to be naughty too. In a movie starring a philosophy professor, that’s especially funny, a wry joke on us all.

But there’s more surprising philosophical depth in “Hit Man” than meets the eye. While on the surface it’s more or less a romantic comedy, beneath the hood it’s a coming-of-age story for Gary, whose life has stagnated. After a divorce, he lives alone with his two cats named Id and Ego and a large collection of plants; his students make fun of him for driving a Honda Civic, and he eats cereal for dinner. Gary is perfectly content with his life, or at least he thinks he is. But it slowly becomes clear the simplicity is less choice and more comfort zone. He’s lost himself somewhere along the way. He’s ruled out the possibility of surprise and adventure. Being a fake hit man gives him the possibility of inhabiting other selves, other lives — of trying on identities for size.

The question of the self — where it resides, whether we’re stagnant or able to change — has long been a fixation for philosophers, and Gary is no different. He declares his “primary interest” to be “the eternal mystery of human consciousness and behavior.” At the start of the semester, he tells his students that they’ll be challenging the notion of the self that semester, from social identity to close relationships. “What if your ‘self’ is a construction, an illusion, an act, a role you’ve been playing every day since you can remember?” he asks them, smiling. Teacher, teach thyself.

That inquiry is woven throughout “Hit Man,” which takes a definite point of view on the subject. Yes, the self is changeable — but it takes a bit of bravery to discover who you want to be. What’s more, no man is an island. The self doesn’t change when we grit our teeth and decide to be different, but when other people see us, recognize who we are and decide to love us for it.

Don’t get me wrong. I can imagine some enterprising philosophy teachers constructing extra credit assignments around “Hit Man,” but it definitely doesn’t feel like homework. You don’t even have to pick up on the headier bits to have a load of fun. It’s radiant and loose and confident, the kind of movie that you can just tell was a blast to make, which makes it a blast to watch. As our overstuffed big-budget era starts to falter, let’s hope they start making movies like this again.

Netflix usually gives their films theatrical releases so they can be considered for awards.

Sex scenes can help strengthen actors’ on-screen chemistry and create a connection between characters, but they’re not always as sexy as you might expect behind the scenes.

Case in point: Glen Powell and Adria Arjona filmed their Hit Man love scenes under less-than-ideal circumstances. In a clip from the duo’s forthcoming appearance on The Drew Barrymore Show, Arjona explains how they overcame an immense obstacle to bring their cinematic romance to life.

“This will describe Glen really quickly,” Arjona says in the clip. “I'm breaking out in a rash and Glen is freaking out for me. He's like, ‘What do you want?’ He calls a nurse. This whole thing is happening. He's like, ‘Adria, are you fine? Should we postpone this scene?’, all this stuff.”

Powell shouldn’t have been so concerned for Arjona, as he had problems of his own. “I was like, ‘Dude, have you seen yourself in the mirror?’” Arjona remembers. “And he just looks at himself in the mirror. He's like, ‘Oh my God, I have it too!’ And he had it all over his body, but he was so focused on me.”

Arjona and Powell ended up proceeding with the scenes anyway.

“We were like, ‘Well, I guess we're just gonna put makeup on it,’” the actress recalls. “And we ended up going ahead, and we did all our sex scenes with this rash, which wasn't very sexy because it was more like ‘Cut!’ and we were both like ‘Get off of me!’”

Hit Man sees the Anyone but You star reunite with filmmaker Richard Linklater, whom he previously worked with on Fast Food Nation, Everybody Wants Some, and Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood. Linklater, who also helmed acclaimed movies like Before Sunrise and Boyhood, wrote the screenplay for Hit Man with Powell.

Powell broke down his character in an interview with Entertainment Weekly.

“A lot of this movie is really about the way we label ourselves, and the way we see ourselves moving through the world,” the actor said. “Gary is a man who’s moving through the world without an identity, so to speak. He just is attracted to what he is attracted to. He loves ornithology, he loves audio A/V equipment. He’s fascinated by a lot, but passionate about little. He doesn't put any thought into the presentational part of his life, except when he is in these sting operations.”

Hit Man is now playing in select theaters and will debut on Netflix on June 7. Adria Arjona and Glen Powell will appear on The Drew Barrymore Show on Monday, June 3.

Next week, on June 7, the entertaining and highly acclaimed geek-goes-undercover-as-contract-killer screwball romantic thriller “Hit Man,” starring It Dude of the moment Glen Powell, drops on Netflix. But this weekend, in case you hadn’t noticed, the movie opened “in theaters.” How many theaters? If you use your hands and feet to count, you’ll have most of them covered.

Netflix, the company that did for streaming what McDonald’s did for fast food (made it everyone’s new normal), always likes to make a big show of when it’s playing a movie “in theaters.” It has long amused me to see entertainment journalists get suckered into this public-relations gambit, for the simple reason that so many of them live in New York and L.A., where the tiny number of theaters occasionally playing a Netflix movie tend to be. A film opens five blocks from your house, and you think, “Yes, there it is! In theaters.”

But seriously, you could fit the number of people who will see “Hit Man” in theaters onto the head of a pin. It’s a Netflix movie, and it has been ever since Netflix bought it at the Venice Film Festival last September for $20 million. I can’t say how many people will watch “Hit Man” on Netflix, and maybe that number will be huge. Or maybe, as is often the case, we won’t know. (Netflix is a cagey monolith when it comes to revealing viewership numbers.) But here’s something you can take to the bank: When “Hit Man” starts streaming next weekend, the buzz that surrounds it, the avid hum of what we used to call “the conversation,” is going to be…zero. Nada. Crickets. It’s going to be a movie falling in the forest and not making a sound.

Ted Sarandos, the co-CEO of Netflix and its paradigm-setting leader, likes to think of his company as the future. And perhaps it is. But when it comes to movies, or at least the kind of high-profile quality movies that used to be the engine of what we once called, you know, movies, I think of Netflix as the Bermuda Triangle. It’s the ocean of product where films go to disappear.

If “Hit Man” were being released by a conventional studio (if that even exists anymore), and if it were opening next weekend on 2,000 screens, would it be a hit? Who knows? Yet with everything that “Hit Man” has going for it (the freshly minted stardom of Glen Powell, a rash of great reviews, the fact that the movie — though I liked it a notch less than most critics — is Richard Linklater’s diverting and original rendition of a romantic-comedy ride), it’s no stretch to say that it would likely be a solid mid-level performer. I’d wager it could have made a domestic total of $30 to $40 million.

That may not sound like much at a moment when the bottom seems to be falling out of the theatrical motion-picture business. According to the logic of the box office, what Hollywood doesn’t need right now is a quirky philosophical indie rom-com that takes in $35 million. It needs home runs, megahits, stratospheric blockbusters. And yes, it certainly does. But I’d also argue that it’s that thinking — four decades’ worth of it — that’s part of what has made the prospect of a mid-level hit seem so trivial-to-the-point-of-irrelevance. As the film industry, faced with its looming existential crisis, begins to rethink how it does business, one factor that might enter its thinking would be to reconsider the value of hits that are singles and doubles: modestly budgeted entertainments that find their niche. That’s a lot of what movies were, before JawsStarWarsGhostbustersDieHardTerminatorBatmanMarvel. We shouldn’t be dismissing movies that are good enough to win an audience but not big enough to break the bank.

Ted Sarandos doesn’t dismiss them. On the contrary, he keeps buying them. And in doing so, he keeps taking them off the table. Are those two things deliberately connected? For Sarandos, “Hit Man” playing on Netflix is a victory. But for the film industry at large, it’s a defeat. I now have an entire roster of films that have streamed on Netflix, or will in the near future, that could potentially have been theatrical hits. Movies like the fantastic high-finance sexual-politics drama “Fair Play.” Or David Fincher’s hit-man extravaganza “The Killer.” Or “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.” Or the buzziest film of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the trans cartel musical “Emilia Pérez” (which Netflix just bought for $8 million).

Each of these movies could have found an audience and, in its way, bolstered the industry. And it’s time that the industry — everyone in it — starts to unite in realizing that the future of movies may depend, in part, on a hundred modest successes, a hundred sparks that stoke a roaring fire. Even if a Marvel movie, or “Godzilla Part 23” or “Inside Out: The Live Action Wow,” doesn’t happen to be coming out that week, the audience still needs to think of movie theaters as places of possibility.

A business observer might say that to save this industry, singles and doubles won’t cut it — that we need grand slams. And it’s true; we do. But one thing the gradual burnout of Marvel-movie addiction has demonstrated is that a top-heavy film industry has the potential to crash in on itself. To save the industry, we need to save and sustain movie culture. Singles and doubles do that. Movies like “Hit Man” and “Fair Play” and “Emilia Pérez” are part of what keep people excited about movies.

Ted Sarandos knows all this. His job is to make Netflix exciting. But I also fear that he has a vested interest in trying to make movie theaters less exciting. That’s a speculative opinion, but Sarandos, cards-close-to-the-vest titan that he is, offered an unusually candid peek into his thinking in the interview he gave last week to the New York Times.

“Oppenheimer” and “Barbie,” he said, would have found just as big an audience on Netflix (which he might be right about, though I doubt it). But then he said, in reference to those films, “There’s no reason to believe that the movie itself is better in any size of screen for all people.” No reason to believe. Actually, for millions and millions of people around the globe, those movies were clearly better because they played as the larger-than-life spectacles they were. Sarandos then told an anecdote that spoke a thousand words, mentioning that his son, a 28-year-old film editor, had watched “Lawrence of Arabia” on his phone. He simply stated it as a fact, but what he was saying is: It’s fine! Why not get with the program and watch “Lawrence of Arabia” on your phone?

And that, in the context of what’s now happening to movie culture, is a casually blasphemous statement. If Sarandos truly believes that size doesn’t matter, and that we might as well be watching “Lawrence of Arabia” on our phones, it’s worth asking: What does he think movie theaters are even good for? Netflix bought a couple of legendary movie theaters (the Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles, the Paris Theater in New York), and did a splendid job of refurbishing them, and it has done a lovely, if heavily synergistic, job of programming them. So you might say that Netflix officially likes movie theaters. But in another sense, you could say Ted Sarandos thinks movie theaters are mostly good for one thing: to throw a few of his movies into, in a token scattered way, to fool everyone in the industry into thinking that he might be on their side.