Whenever Glen Powell leans in, his eyes hungry and his smile upturned like an oxbow lake, he looks a little like his Top Gun: Maverick co-star, Tom Cruise. Or, at the very least, he exudes that same sense of concrete intent, performed with the easy confidence of flicking a cigarette butt across a dive bar floor. It’s said that franchise cinema killed the movie star. But Powell could certainly pass as one, and it’s all on display in Netflix’s Hit Man, which he co-wrote and produced with director and longtime collaborator Richard Linklater, who gave him roles in Fast Food Nation, Everybody Wants Some!!, and Apollo 10 1⁄2: A Space Age Childhood.
In Hit Man, Powell stars as Gary Johnson, a real-life guy whose undercover operations were very different from what we see on screen (as the film stresses). This Gary is a humble dweeb. A professor of psychology and philosophy at the University of New Orleans, he comes home from a long day of being bullied by his students for driving a Honda Civic to feed his bird and two cats, Ego and Id. But he’s content and has a tidy side gig working tech on the local police’s sting operations, catching would-be murderers by having a cop (Austin Amelio’s Jasper) pose as a low-rent hitman.
