Acclaimed at the Venice Film Festival, the romantic action comedy “Hit Man” is broadcast on television this Wednesday, September 4, but is also available for streaming.
Hit Man is probably the cinema surprise of this new school year. First, because this film directed by the astonishing Richard Linklater (the trilogy of Before, Boyhood…) warmly received at the Venice Film Festival will not be released in cinemas in France and will go directly to television. It is Canal++ which is broadcasting it for the first time in our territory on Wednesday September 4. Subscribers to the encrypted channel will thus be able to discover a comedy refreshing, very well written, and carried by the alchemy between its main acting duo (Glen Powell and Adria Arjona).
Then, because this action comedy/thriller/romance (all at once) tells an unusual story, yet loosely inspired by a true story: that of Gary Johnson, a university professor of psychology and philosophy who finds himself working for the police. His role: to pretend to be a hitman to bring down his sponsors, all while using false identities and hilarious disguises. But when he falls for the charm of a client who is a victim of domestic violence and wants to use his “services”, the machine goes off the rails.
If Gary Johnson did indeed exist, his love story with a woman who was a victim of domestic violence and all the intrigues that resulted from it are completely fictional. In an interview with Première, the main actor Glen Powell recounts having discovered the extraordinary life of this psychology professor who poses as a hitman for the police in a magazine.
But a paragraph in the article mentioning the time Gary Johnson let a woman go free rather than arrest her intrigued him: “I had a million questions about that little paragraph,” the comedian recalls. “With Richard [Linklater, le réalisateur, NDLR] We decided to extrapolate from that.” To find out Hit Manso it’s on Canal+ that you have to go this Wednesday from 9:10 p.m. It is also available now on the MyCanal streaming platform.