Richard Linklater to direct undercover hitman-cop movie

Richard Linklater has added another new movie this week to his already crowded filmmaking schedule, with the director—whose most recent efforts included Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood, 2019's Where’d Ya Go Bernadette, and, of course, two episodes of That Animal Rescue Show—has just added an action-comedy called Hitman to his plate.

Tragically (at least, for fans of video game franchises where you can kill billionaires with exploding golfballs), the film has nothing to do with the long-running games series of the same name, adapted into two films in 2007 and 2015. Instead, Linklater is apparently basing his movie on the life of Gary Johnson, a staff investigator for a Texas district attorney’s office who became local law enforcement’s go-to guy for going undercover as a fake hitman to catch people trying to arrange a contract murder.

Linklater’s take on the material will star Glen Powell, who’s currently set to star in Tom Cruise’s new “Planes Go Fast” movie, Top Gun: Maverick. Powell will both serve as a co-writer on the film, and star as its take on Johnson, here described as (per Variety) “a Houston cop who’s been working undercover as the most in-demand hitman” in the city. (It’s not clear from the logline whether Linklater and Powell’s version is also only faking his professional murder bona fides, or if he’s actually performing the hits.) But, wouldn’t you know it: “one day he breaks protocol in order to help a desperate woman (Adria Arjona) trying to escape an abusive boyfriend.”

Which doesn’t sound, precisely, like the formula for an action-comedy, to us. But, then, Linklater has always been unpredictable, tossing a darkly funny Bernie or Scanner Darkly in between his more meditative or nostalgic projects. Production on the film is reportedly set to start in October; Linklater is also supposedly working on biopics of both Bill Hicks and conman John Brinkley, and is in the midst of his ambitious, 20-year-plan to film Merrily We Roll Along, so, yeah: Guy keeps busy.