Following the business of cinema these days can feel a bit like watching a patient who, slowly expiring on a physician’s table, keeps getting slammed with drugs or electric charges that temporarily jerk him back to life — only for despair to set in among the attending doctors when the drugs wear off or the next shock doesn’t seem to work.

Movies are dying and then — zap! — here’s Top Gun: Maverick to save them. Movies are on life support and then — whoosh! — here comes the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon, straight into the veins. Movies are in deep trouble, they need a Memorial Day jolt — but oh no, the Mad Max sequel didn’t have the juice the patient needed, quick, get a Bad Boys sequel into their system, hope it stabilizes them . . .

The basic problem for Hollywood is that as audiences have finally, mercifully tired of superhero movies, the business has become only more dependent on non-superhero blockbusters’ hitting big — and with a dearth of movies in the pipeline because of the writers’ strike, the big hits need to be really big indeed.

The solution should be to rebuild the business as it once existed, as an industry that churns out mid-budget movies that earn reasonable, consistent grosses and keep theaters in business by selling tickets to adults. But in practice, the mid-budget movies either don’t get made, get kicked to streaming quickly when they don’t have a massive opening weekend, or get snapped up preemptively by the streaming companies, which are also overextended and in dire need of hits.

The latest example of this pattern is Hit Man, a Richard Linklater movie bought by Netflix and given the barest of theatrical releases. In a different world it might have been a sleeper summer hit for grown-ups, earning a hundred million dollars and confirming the stardom of its lead, Glen Powell. In this world it’s just another streaming “success,” with plenty of couch-bound viewers but no real cultural existence as a capital-M Movie.

Or at least that’s the narrative around the movie, to which Linklater himself has contributed in interviews — blaming the big studios for having “abdicated” from making films for grown-ups, casting Hit Man as a throwback to the days when the movies made adulthood seem interesting, sexy, dangerous, and cool, contrasting his film with the current Hollywood vibe of “just stay a 13-year-old forever. . . . Play with toys. Read comic books. Never mature. Don’t even have sex while you’re at it. And good luck.”

I am fully on Team Linklater for this critique, but I’m not sure his new movie is actually quite as grown-up as all that. Powell plays Gary Johnson, a philosophy lecturer at the University of New Orleans who supplements his academic salary by doing electronics work for cops running sting operations on people trying to hire a hit man. When the regular fake hit man gets suspended from the force, Johnson gets pressed into service, showing up in character to fulfill some fool’s desire to off a spouse or rival and then inducing him to self-incriminate. And the somewhat milquetoast-y, passion-deficient academic discovers that he loves the work, finding a new character to play every time — redneck, Eurotrash, gangbanger, Tilda Swinton knockoff — that lets him leave his ordinary self behind.

Eventually, though, one of the clients is a gorgeous woman (Adria Arjona) trying to take out a hit on a controlling and abusive spouse, and Johnson falls hard and fast for her — fast enough that he talks her out of hiring him instead of proceeding with the entrapment, and hard enough that he ends up romancing her (in character), sleeping with her (in character), pulling a gun on her husband for her . . . you can see where this is going.

Or maybe you can’t, because while Hit Man seems like a marriage of a broad comedy and a film noir, it ultimately refuses to do the film noir thing, which is also the grown-up thing, of showing you how a well-meaning guy can get in way over his head. Instead it turns out that Johnson is really good at inhabiting his hit-man persona, really capable when it comes to overcoming the various obstacles thrown up by the bad husband and the cops, and ruthlessly nihilistic (the movie name-checks Nietzsche in scenes where Johnson lectures about the philosophy of self-creation to college undergrads) when it comes to navigating the moral dilemmas involved in going from being a fake killer to a real one.

Imagine Raskolnikov untrammeled by a conscience, or Body Heat with a happy ending, and you have the movie’s basic vibe. Is that really the vibe of a movie for adults, the kind that contrasts with the Marvel factory? Because it seems more tailored to an audience that’s always eager to believe that a guy who’s nerdy and awkward (but really, really jacked) can magically come into his own as a lover and a killer and run circles around his marks and rivals without suffering at all — an audience, that is, of 13-year-old boys.