Movies

This Brilliant but Overlooked Neo-Noir Thriller with 97% Critic Score Is a Must-Watch

This Brilliant but Overlooked Neo-Noir Thriller with 97% Critic Score Is a Must-Watch
Image credit: Netflix

If not for Maverick, this movie would have been the reason for Glen Powell’s ascent.

Action, thriller, and comedy — all these genres and their blends are so dramatically overpopulated that it’s nearly impossible to find something completely original. But realistically, you don’t even need to! All you need is a movie that mixes them so perfectly and effortlessly and adds as many unique twists and turns to familiar tropes as this 2023 Glen Powell movie that you somehow overlooked, and you’re golden.

Hit Man Takes the Best from All Its Genres

As a natural in assuming different identities, a professor serves as a part-time mole for the police. By posing as a reliable hitman, he exposes his unfortunate clients for the arrest, preventing their targets’ deaths, and he’s great at his job. But the situation gets a lot more complicated when he falls for a charming young woman who hires him to kill her husband — and for the first time ever, he goes against his principles.

2023’s Hit Man takes the best from its genres — neo-noir, crime, action, thriller, comedy, and so on — and builds upon them. We have an undercover man who falls for a femme fatale and gets dragged into a dangerous game, but the very use of these tropes and the story that surrounds them are so unique and captivating that it feels like an entirely new story. That’s the kind of cinema we like!

Despite Critical Acclaim, Hit Man Went Unnoticed

For the concentrated and satisfying cinematic punch it packs, Hit Man must have been a theatrical hit, but it never became one. Critics clearly loved the movie: on Rotten Tomatoes, Glen Powell’s fake killer outing boasts a stunning 97% Tomatometer Score, and on the stricter IMDb, it has an impressive 7.5/10 score.

The general audience, however, never learned about the movie, and it’s a real shame: for the sheer amount of mediocrity we get on a yearly basis in these genres, Hit Man should have been praised as the much-needed breath of fresh air. If you’re willing to add to the criminally small group of people who appreciate this neo-noir comedy thriller, you can watch Hit Man on Netflix.