'Hit Man' Is Based on the Wild True Story of a Real-Life Fake Killer (original) (raw)

Adria Arjona's Madison standing behind Glen Powell's Gary in Hit Man

Image via Netflix

Published Jun 7, 2024, 9:30 AM EDT

Thomas Butt is a senior writer. An avid film connoisseur, Thomas actively logs his film consumption on Letterboxd and vows to connect with many more cinephiles through the platform. He is immensely passionate about the work of Martin Scorsese, John Ford, and Albert Brooks. His work can be read on Collider and Taste of Cinema. He also writes for his own blog, The Empty Theater, on Substack. He is also a big fan of courtroom dramas and DVD commentary tracks. For Thomas, movie theaters are a second home. A native of Wakefield, MA, he is often found scrolling through the scheduled programming on Turner Classic Movies and making more room for his physical media collection. Thomas habitually increases his watchlist and jumps down a YouTube rabbit hole of archived interviews with directors and actors. He is inspired to write about film to uphold the medium's artistic value and to express his undying love for the art form. Thomas looks to cinema as an outlet to better understand the world, human emotions, and himself.

Summary

Hit Man is a film based on a true story about an undercover cop posing as a contract killer.
The protagonist, Gary Johnson, is a charismatic individual adept at persuasion, which led to dozens of arrests.
The film mirrors the absurdity in everyday life and examines the degradation of American ideals through the clients' morally unjustifiable motivations.

Richard Linklater's latest film, Hit Man, is one of the most anticipated films on the 2024 film calendar. Now on Netflix, the film is set to be a building block for one of Hollywood's rising megastars, Glen Powell, who is not only the star of Hit Man, but also Linklater's co-writer. Powell and Linklater have previously collaborated on the adaptation Fast Food Nation, the coming-of-age baseball comedy, Everybody Wants Some!!!, and the animated nostalgic look at the space race, Apollo 10 1⁄2: A Space Age Childhood. Without even considering the revered talent in the project, its alluring concept of an undercover police officer posing as a contract killer to arrest his employers serves as a sturdy backbone for a genre picture. Each of Linklater's films is a rich concoction of comedy and drama. The writer-director's humanist storytelling may clash with the outlandish synopsis of the film's plot. However, Hit Man is far from an outlandish story, as it is based on a wild true story.

Release Date

May 24, 2024

Runtime

116 minutes

Director

Richard Linklater

Writers

Richard Linklater, Glen Powell

Producers

Jason Bateman, John Sloss, Julie Goldstein, Steve Barnett, Stuart Ford, Glen Powell, Michael Costigan, Alan Powell, Shivani Rawat, Mike Blizzard, Miguel Palos, Vicky Patel, Megan Creydt, Scott Brown

Inspired by an unbelievable true story, a strait-laced professor discovers his hidden talent as a fake hit man. He meets his match in a client who steals his heart and ignites a powder keg of deception, delight, and mixed-up identities.

Richard Linklater and Glen Powell Adapt a True Story From Their Home State

Linklater's film, which received rave reviews from its premiere at the Venice International Film Festival in 2023, follows Gary Johnson (Powell), a community college professor-turned-technology specialist turned undercover police officer who poses as a contract killer to arrest those trying to hire him. Like all the best fictional assassins, he is devoid of sentimentality towards his clients. That is, until he encounters a woman, Maddy Masters (Adria Arjona), abused by her husband. Complicating his calculated professionalism, Johnson, who becomes attracted to Maddy, commits to freeing her from this toxic relationship.

Hit Man is adapted from a real story documented by Texas Monthly in 2001. The article of the same name was written by Skip Hollandsworth, whose work served as the basis for another black comedy/docu-drama by Linklater, Bernie. That film, starring Jack Black as a folksy mortician convicted of murder, adapts an absurdist story and infuses it with Linklater's natural humanism and sharp commentary on Texas culture. A Lone Star native, Linklater is to Texas what Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee are to New York City. He admires his upbringing, but his films actively examine the fraught societal codes and expectations brought on by its people. As a Texas journalist and publisher, Hollandsworth perfectly complements the director, as both seamlessly take a human interest in peculiar oddities in everyday life.

‘Hit Man’ Is Based on the Story of an Undercover Contract Killer in Texas

"Hit Man" chronicles the procedure of arresting individuals soliciting contract killers. When the police are tipped off of a person looking for someone to be murdered, they send in Gary Johnson to meet with this "client." If he can generate a confession from the client that they want a specific person killed, the police have the grounds for an arrest. Hollandsworth's extensive feature story is thoroughly researched and studied. Through one magazine article, the reader comprehends the impenetrable psychology of Gary Johnson, a true jack-of-all-trades. It may seem implausible that one person could've arranged over 60 arrests of people soliciting a professional assassin without his cover ever being compromised, but Hollandsworth underlines the charisma that Johnson carried himself with during each sit-down with a "client." Without breaking a sweat, Johnson persuaded people that they should place a hit on a target, usually an unfaithful lover or rival of envy. Once the suspect orders the hit, the police subsequently arrest the solicitor.

Johnson is an inscrutable man. His mysterious aura makes him the ideal mock contract killer--a true human chameleon able to adapt to his surroundings. Hollandsworth characterizes the hitman as your average, mild-mannered individual who no one bats an eye at, writing that one would mistake him for merely a "low-level clerk" at the District Attorney's office. He lives a precise and fastidious lifestyle that sees him eating at the same establishment for lunch every day. Contrary to the hard-edged persona expected from an assassin, Johnson listens to classical music and audiobooks in the car. The understated lifestyle and dichotomy between high-class taste and low-class labor is invoked by the most notable fictitious professional killers, including the lonely killer in Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samouraï, Tom Cruise's jazz-loving nihilist in Collateral, and Michael Fassbender's emotionless hunter in The Killer.

Beneath his veneer as an unassuming college professor, Johnson has profound meditations on the state of modern life at the turn of the century. In the hyperactive consumerist economy in America, Johnson is not at all surprised that people seek out quick remedies for their problems. "Today people can pay to get their televisions fixed and their garbage picked up, so why can’t they pay me, a hit man, to fix their lives?" Johnson pondered. The faux killer remarked that the precarious status of the economy drove the desire for drastic measures. "When it starts going bad...everyone gets a little bit crazier and starts thinking about knocking someone else off," he said.

The absurdity of the Texas Monthly article is a byproduct of the middle-class angst prevalent at the turn of the century--commentary widely expressed in the films of 1999, including Fight Club and Office Space. In Johnson's trade, people with relatively innocuous problems resort to the absolute extreme in hiring a contract killer. For people skeptical of Richard Linklater's ability to tell a story about the criminal underworld in his upcoming film, no need to worry. According to Johnson, the vast majority of his clients were not ex-cons. They were upstanding citizens who never even received a speeding ticket. The ease with which individuals belonging to a civilized world go to such drastic measures speaks to the degradation of the idealistic Americana. As Hollandsworth puts it, Johnson's meetings with clients where they ordered hits were "textbook studies of the banality of evil." Clients' motivations for calling the undercover hitman's services were hardly morally justifiable, as most cases involved suspected adultery, frustration with employers, or custody disputes. Most bewildering of all is that, even as Johnson began attracting media attention from The Houston Chronicle, with stories printing his name and quotes from Johnson, clients never slowed down. The demand for assassinations was that high.

Gary Johnson of ‘Hit Man’ in Real Life Was a Charismatic Star

Gary Johnson's defining trait, the skill that allowed him to excel in the unique position of orchestrating sting operations on solicitors of contract killers, was his persuasion. Despite his mild-mannered attitude, Johnson's charisma saw no bounds. His infectious personality led to clients calling for the assassination of a respective target without fail. Johnson's astute persuasion flirted with blatant manipulation at times. A lawyer or judge could reasonably take issue with some of his cunning tactics to trigger a confession. Ultimately, the only charge a prosecutor could give Johnson is being the most convincing actor in the world. In the world of undercover investigation, Johnson is Laurence Olivier, as Hollandsworth puts it. A supervisor of Johnson's stated, "Gary is a truly great performer who can turn into whatever he needs to be in whatever situation he finds himself." He would adapt to the client's circumstances by altering his wardrobe or personality.

The anticipation for Hit Man extends beyond the principal talent involved in the film. Not only is the film based on a surreal true story, but the life of Gary Johnson is the perfect analog to filmmaking. He lived off of deception, which is the heart of the filmmaking process. Skip Hollandsworth's story in Texas Monthly centers around a man who uses charm to achieve his goals. Among the field of active movie stars, how many are more charming than Glen Powell? The actor is ready to leap to superstardom, and this upcoming Richard Linklater film is sure to elevate him into a household name.

Hit Man is available to watch on Netflix in the U.S.

Watch on Netflix