Hit Man is a 2024 crime comedy film written by Richard Linklater and Glen Powell, inspired by a true story first reported in a 2001 Texas Monthly article about Gary Johnson, a real New Orleans professor and part-time police consultant who spent years posing as a hitman in FBI sting operations. Directed by Linklater — whose career spans Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise, Boyhood, and School of Rock — the film is a gleeful, stylistically confident blend of comedy, romance, and thriller that stands as one of the director's most purely entertaining and commercially accessible works.

Glen Powell stars as Gary Johnson, a mild-mannered philosophy professor who discovers an unexpected talent and appetite for playing hired killers in undercover operations — slipping effortlessly between personas, costumes, and accents to become whatever the client needs to see. When he meets Madison (Adria Arjona), a woman who comes to him seeking escape from an abusive husband, Gary breaks every protocol by developing real feelings for her — creating a dangerous entanglement between the hitman he plays and the person he actually is. Austin Amelio, Retta, and Sanjay Rao provide strong supporting turns in a film that keeps its audience off-balance about who and what to trust.

Hit Man premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 2023 and was subsequently acquired by Netflix for a 2024 theatrical and streaming release, becoming one of the platform's most acclaimed original films that year. The film was celebrated for Powell's star-making performance — a comedically expert, physically precise turn that established him as one of Hollywood's most versatile leading men — and for Linklater's assured, playful direction, which brings the same improvisational spirit and philosophical lightness to genre material that has characterized his career's best work.