There are plenty of things to enjoy about Hit Man. It’s funny, effortlessly charming, and Glenn Powell switches between different personalities with so much ease that it’s easy to get caught up in the performances themselves.
What kept pulling my attention elsewhere were the classroom scenes.
The movie opens with Gary teaching psychology and philosophy, returns to those lectures throughout the story, and comes back to the classroom one final time before its family epilogue. They’re easy to treat as pauses between the undercover work and the romance, but they quietly mirror everything Gary is living through.
Once those scenes are viewed as part of the movie’s structure rather than interruptions, Hit Man starts asking a surprisingly focused question. Not whether Gary is secretly Ron. Not whether he’s finally becoming his “true self.” But whether personality is something we uncover, or something we practice.
That question doesn’t just reshape Gary’s journey. It changes the way almost every major scene in the film fits together.
The Classroom Was Never a Side Story
Hit Man opens in a classroom and, aside from its brief family epilogue, returns to one for its final act. That alone makes it difficult to dismiss those scenes as simple reminders that Gary is a professor. They’re woven into the story.
Each lecture introduces an idea that the story quietly puts to the test. It begins with Nietzsche’s call to “live dangerously,” moves into whether personality is fixed or constructed, explores Freud’s model of the mind, questions the morality of killing, and finally arrives at a much more open-ended view of identity. Taken together, the lectures feel less like standalone lessons and more like the framework through which the movie examines Gary’s transformation.
The conversation with Gary’s ex-wife feels like the point where the movie puts its central question into words. Gary argues that personality changes only within narrow limits, while she points to research on the Big Five personality traits suggesting people are far more capable of change than we once believed. The movie never settles that debate in the classroom. Instead, it quietly spends the rest of its runtime testing it.
That shifts the focus of Gary’s journey. Rather than asking whether Ron is the “real” Gary, Hit Man begins asking whether personality is something we uncover or something we practice.
The Debate the Movie Quietly Sets Up
Gary’s conversation with his ex-wife is easy to overlook because, on the surface, it feels like two former partners catching up over coffee. But almost every line of that conversation ends up echoing through the rest of the movie.
Gary believes personality can change, but only within narrow limits. His ex disagrees, bringing up research around the Big Five personality traits that suggests people remain far more adaptable than we once assumed. Modern personality psychology increasingly supports that idea. While traits are relatively stable, repeated behaviours, major life transitions, and even deliberate practice have all been shown to shift aspects of personality over time.
The interesting part is that Hit Man never tries to prove either of them right through dialogue. Once the debate is introduced, the movie leaves the classroom behind and starts looking for an answer somewhere else.
Instead of arguing about personality, Gary begins living through situations that constantly push him outside his own behavioural patterns. If the classroom presents the hypothesis, everything that follows starts looking like the experiment.
Ron Isn’t Gary’s True Self
The easiest way to read Ron is as Gary’s hidden personality finally breaking free. The movie certainly flirts with that idea, but I don’t think it ever fully commits to it.
By the time Ron appears, Gary has already stepped into several different personas for undercover operations. Each one speaks differently, dresses differently and carries themselves differently depending on who they’re meeting. Ron isn’t the first persona he creates. He’s simply the first one that follows him home.
That’s an important distinction.
At first, Ron exists because the job requires him to. But over time, Gary starts carrying parts of that confidence into situations where there’s no reason to perform anymore. One of the clearest examples comes during the courtroom scene. Earlier in the film, Gary quietly lets his lawyer do all the talking. Later, after spending so much time as Ron, he naturally speaks up for himself. Nobody asks him to become Ron in that moment. He simply reacts differently.
That shift is what makes the earlier conversation about personality so interesting in hindsight. Modern personality research doesn’t suggest people wake up as entirely different individuals overnight. Instead, it points toward something much smaller but far more believable: repeated patterns of behaviour can gradually reshape the person expressing them.
Ron begins as a role. Somewhere along the way, parts of that role stop belonging to Ron and start belonging to Gary. The movie isn’t revealing a hidden self. It’s showing what repeated practice can look like when it slowly becomes part of someone’s identity.
We Don’t Become Someone New Alone
Gary isn’t the only person experimenting with a new identity. Madison is doing the same.
By the time they begin spending time together, she has left her abusive marriage, presents herself differently, talks about having a “new me, new life,” and openly questions what comes next. Just like Gary, she isn’t discovering a finished version of herself. She’s stepping into one possibility after another to see what fits.
That also changes the way their relationship reads.
Gary tells his ex that he isn’t meant for a “normal” relationship. Her response is simple: what even counts as normal? Everyone is messed up in their own way. The goal isn’t to find someone who isn’t. It’s to find someone whose weirdness fits with yours.
That idea quietly becomes the emotional core of the movie.
The strongest moments between Gary and Madison aren’t necessarily the romantic ones. They’re the moments where they work together. The wire scene is a perfect example. On the surface, they’re pretending to be two different people while Jasper listens in. Underneath that performance, they’re communicating almost effortlessly. Small glances, tiny pauses and split-second decisions are enough for both of them to understand exactly what the other is doing.
Later, when Jasper corners them, they barely have time to speak at all. Yet they still move together almost instinctively. The movie never presents this as two attractive people with great chemistry. It feels more like two people who have become unusually fluent in each other.
That might also explain why the romance feels so convincing. Compatibility isn’t treated as finding someone who reveals your “true self.” It’s finding someone who helps you grow into a version of yourself that couldn’t have existed alone.
When Practice Becomes Commitment
One of the more unexpected classroom discussions in Hit Man revolves around capital punishment. At first, it feels oddly disconnected from everything else. Only later does it start making more sense.
The class debates whether there are situations where taking a life can be justified. Gary doesn’t offer an absolute answer. Instead, the discussion becomes another way of asking how people make decisions when every option carries a cost.
That uncertainty eventually reaches Gary and Madison.
Until this point, both of them have been experimenting with different versions of themselves. Gary has been practicing confidence through Ron. Madison has been rebuilding her life after leaving her marriage. Their choices are still, in a sense, reversible. They can always step back.
Jasper changes that.
The wire scene is the first time they fully trust each other under pressure. The confrontation with Jasper is the first time that trust demands an irreversible choice. When Gary picks up the plastic bag and Madison asks what he’s doing, he answers with a single word: “Commitment.”
Commitment isn’t just about their relationship. It’s the moment where practice gives way to action. Up until now, Gary has been trying on different ways of being. This is the first decision he can’t simply walk away from.
Whether that decision is morally right is a different question, and I don’t think the movie expects us to ignore its weight. What it does suggest is that some choices permanently reshape the people making them. We don’t just express who we are through our actions. Sometimes our actions become part of who we are.
That idea also makes the final classroom lecture feel less like a conclusion and more like Gary speaking from experience. By the end of the film, he isn’t teaching abstract theories about personality anymore. He’s lived through them.
The Lecture Gary Couldn’t Have Given at the Beginning
The final classroom scene feels completely different from the one that opens the movie.
Earlier, Gary speaks with the confidence of someone explaining how people work. By the end, that certainty has softened. He tells his students that truth emerges through different points of view, that there are no absolutes, and that the universe—and the people living in it—are far less fixed than they appear. He ends by encouraging them to seize the identity they want for themselves and to pursue it with passion and abandon.
It’s difficult to imagine the Gary from the opening scene giving that lecture.
That’s what makes the classroom scenes so satisfying in retrospect. They aren’t running alongside the story. They’re changing with it. Each lecture captures Gary’s understanding of people at that moment in his life, and together they chart a shift from certainty to possibility.
The family epilogue quietly completes that idea.
When their daughter asks how they met, Madison says she knew Gary was a nice guy even when he acted tough. Gary replies that she made a new man out of him. It’s an easy line to hear as simple romance, but after everything that came before, it carries a little more weight.
The movie never really answers whether Ron was the “real” Gary. In fact, it gradually stops asking that question altogether. What it leaves us with instead is the possibility that identity isn’t something waiting to be uncovered beneath the surface. It’s something shaped by the risks we take, the roles we repeatedly inhabit, the people we choose to build a life with, and the commitments that slowly stop feeling like performances.
That may be why the chemistry between Gary and Madison works as well as it does. It goes beyond two attractive people falling in love. The movie presents two people growing into versions of themselves that fit together remarkably well. Their relationship doesn’t simply reveal who they already were. It participates in who they become.
And maybe that’s the quiet question Hit Man leaves behind. If personality isn’t just something we have, but something we continually practice, then every habit, every role, every relationship and every difficult choice is doing more than expressing who we are.
They’re also shaping who we’re becoming.
Final Thoughts
What I appreciate most about Hit Man is that it never tries to settle the debate it introduces. The movie doesn’t claim personality is infinitely flexible, nor does it insist that we have one authentic self waiting to be uncovered beneath every role we play. It leaves room for something far more interesting.
Gary doesn’t become Ron. Ron simply becomes one of the ways Gary learns to move through the world. By the end of the film, neither label feels entirely sufficient because the person standing in front of the classroom isn’t the same man who walked into it at the beginning.
That transformation also makes the final lecture resonate in a different way. Gary isn’t speaking as someone who has mastered a theory of personality. He’s speaking as someone whose own beliefs have been challenged by experience. The lectures don’t just frame the story—they evolve with it.
Maybe that’s why the final line about Madison making “a new man” out of Gary feels so earned. It isn’t only a romantic sentiment. It’s the natural conclusion to everything the movie has been exploring. We aren’t shaped by isolated moments of self-discovery, but by the roles we repeatedly inhabit, the risks we’re willing to take, the people we allow into our lives, and the choices that slowly stop feeling like performances.
Whether Hit Man fully agrees with that reading is almost beside the point. It’s the question the movie leaves me with that has stayed around the longest: if personality isn’t just something we have, but something we continually practice, what are we becoming without even realizing we’re practicing it?