Hitmanthe cruel wait
Presented out of competition at the Venice Film Festival 2023, then at the Toronto Film Festival and again at Reims Polar 2024, Hitman by Richard Linklater has been acclaimed everywhere. And it was precisely from its prestigious screening at the Venetian festival that it made headlines, given that Netflix immediately purchased the distribution rights, particularly in the United States and the United Kingdom, for the sum of 20 million dollars. With an estimated budget of 8.8 million dollars, the comedy of the author of the trilogy was already a complete success. Before.
However, Netflix does not stream the film in Europe. AS announced on May 30th in addition to North American and British territories, only Australia, New Zealand, Iceland, Hong Kong, Indonesia, India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Korea and Vietnam will be able to discover it 7 June.
In France, was announced in September 2022before filming it Hitman it would be released in theaters, pre-purchased by the company SND. But no news since then. The frustration is real and growing. With an online release June 7 on Netflix, Hitman will undoubtedly also be discovered through less than legal channels in the film’s private territories, which will necessarily hinder its possible future theatrical release…
A perfect romantic thriller
Before its release on Netflix, Hitman Rotten tomatoes it had a limited release in North American theaters onwards May 24, 2024. A wider audience than festival goers and the critical press was therefore able to judge it. And it confirmed everything good that had been said about it. In fact, if we look, his Pomodometer is a 97% (out of 156 reviews) and its audience score a 95%. On IMDB it has a rating of 7.4/10.
It is therefore unanimously so Hitman it is widely appreciated. We were able to discover this during the Reims Polar 2024, and we can attest that it fully deserves it. Written in collaboration with Glen Powell, with whom Richard Linklater directs Hitman a crime thriller caught in a romantic comedy, with a small cast of wonderful actors. Deliberately, the film fits best into the American comedy genre of the 2000s, with a strong lightness and casual humor sublimated by the performances of Glen Powell and Adria Arjona.
Glen Powell and Adria Arjona in sex symbols
The actor plays Gary Johnson, a university professor, with a banal and monotonous life, who occasionally works for the Houston police monitoring undercover missions. The day he will have to replace the policeman undercover who normally poses as a hitman to incriminate those who instigated the murders, Gary turns out to be perfect in this role. He thus passes through the infiltrations, having fun inventing different identities and appearances. But when he meets Maddy, played by Adria Arjona, who asks him to kill her husband, everything changes…
Richard Linklater, who filmed the love affair with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy so well, tightens his magic but in a different genre, and it works perfectly. Glen Powell and Adria Arjona reach rare levels of seduction, all smiles, fatal beauty and jubilant whims. The two actors have a lot of fun and explore all the emotions. There is drama, violence, love and hate, laughter and tears, and it’s all told with remarkable fluidity.
A cinema of the highest level
The fantastic thing Hitman, is that the film seems to create something new and shiny out of something old that’s outdated. In fact, it’s as if we’ve seen this story a thousand times before, the handsome boy with false confidence and the magnificent (future) widow seducing each other, the obstacles to this relationship and the true personalities that reveal themselves intersecting… Richard Linklater succeeds nostalgic and terribly fun rideand therefore this little journey into a cinema a priori surpassed, since he manages to achieve the balance between the detective and romantic dimensions of his film.
That is to say, what seems to lead Hitman seems to be the axis of the police, with his many adventures giving him his time. But this rhythm unfolds on the structure of a pure and subtle romantic comedy, a brilliant way of saying that it is precisely love that is in question, and that the film’s great adventure, its matrix, is sentimental passion.
Sexy, fun, breathtaking, no downtime, Hitman is a true cinematic gem, designed and created with truly contagious passion and pleasure. It is therefore heartbreaking that we cannot currently discover it on Netflix or the big screen, and we sincerely hope that this will be possible soon.
Source: Cine Serie
Ray Ortiz is a journalist at Gossipify, known for his coverage of trending news and current events. He is committed to providing readers with accurate and unbiased reporting, and is respected for his ability to keep readers informed on the latest news and issues.
