hit man (Accomplices to deception in its title in Latin America) It’s Richard Linklater’s new movie. (trilogy Before Dawn, Boyhood) and although it has not yet been released in local movie theaters, it has already arrived on streaming and critics love it. The keys to the new action comedy that should not be overlooked.
The film follows the story of Gary Johnson (Glen Powell), who is the most wanted undercover agent in New Orleans. For his clients, he is the ideal hitman, zero mistakes, always a professional. This will change when he breaks protocol to help an attractive and desperate woman (Adria Arjona) who is trying to escape her abusive boyfriend. For this mission Gary will become one of his false characters and will have to decide between continuing with the mission or falling in love knowing the danger that both of them would be in.
hit man It will arrive in cinemas in Argentina on June 27, but it is already available on the streaming platform Netflix. Unfortunately, it is only Netflix in United States and those who reside in Argentina will have to wait until the last week of June to be able to enjoy the comedy with Ricardo Arjona’s daughter in movie theaters. The comedy, which had its premiere at the 80th Venice International Film Festival in September 2023, has a rating of 97% for fresh tomatoes on Rotten Tomatoes and a score of 7.1 on IMDb, sites that compile views from specialized critics and of moviegoers.
In the words of its director, hit man “is loosely based on a true crime article I read almost twenty years ago in Texas Monthly. The film tries to hit the nail on the head: comedy, film noir, thriller, psychological study… and, above all, it examines the concept of identity and how immovable our personalities may or may not be.”
How the story of Hit Man, the film with Ricardo Arjona’s daughter, came about
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Richard Linklater received a call from his friend and collaborator Glen Powell, who asked him if he had ever read the story hit man. “I read it in 2001 when it was published. The writer, Skip Hollandsworth, is a friend of mine. “I became obsessed with the story and over the years I thought about it, but I never considered it in my head as a movie because the story doesn’t seem to go anywhere.”.
Producer Michael Costigan had shown Skip Hollandsworth’s Texas Monthly article to Powell, who was also intrigued by the story and agreed that there was an interesting character in the article. When Costigan asked him who he thought would be good to discuss it with him, Glen’s immediate response was Richard Linklater. Powell said: “There is no one who better understands the intricate nature of what makes human beings human. He thinks about these things like no one I have ever met. So very early in the pandemic, I proposed it to Rick, and we soon began to “find a way for the story to work as a movie”. For both of them it became the pandemic script project.
“There was a sentence near the end of the article where Gary Johnson found a woman who was trying to kill her husband, but he saw humanity in her. He looked at this person and thought, ‘She’s a victim of her circumstances, and I want to help her overcome this’. A guy who imitated humanity was also finding his own humanity. That relationship turned out to be the key to the entire film,” Powell recalled in production notes.
