The Big Picture

Hit Man
is a sexy, dangerous, and fun rom-com that balances laughs with thrills.
The real Gary Johnson faced more danger than Glen Powell’s portrayal did.
Linklater and Powell’s film reinvents Johnson’s life, turning it into a romantic comedy with exaggerated details.

Hit Man, the latest film by director Richard Linklater and A-List star Glen Powell, is a rare gem of a release that’s currently riding high on Netflix. Balancing the understated qualities of Linklater’s films like Boyhood with the outgoing charisma of its heartthrob lead, the movie follows a fictionalized account of the life of Gary Johnson, an undercover police operative who poses as a series of hit men in order to extract confessions from would-be homicidal clients. Hit Man is as outlandishly funny as it is sexy, injecting humor and intrigue into the tedious life of its protagonist, but the life of the real Gary Johnson includes even more elements of danger and sadness.

Roughly based on the 2001 Texas Monthly article, “Hit Man,” by Skip Hollandsworth, the movie takes great liberties to keep its story entertaining, painting the portrait of a man whose life becomes infinitely more interesting when he’s pretending to be someone else. Co-written by both Linklater and Powell, the film features a kinky sex montage and a series of costume changes in a genre mash-up that allows Glen Powell to turn Gary Johnson’s mundane life into a steamy rom-com, a police thriller with echoes of Bonnie and Clyde, and the easygoing tone of comedies like Ride Along. In the process, Linklater and Powell elevate the tone of Johnson’s own story, giving the man a movie truly worthy of his many eccentric characters.

Hit Man 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.Release Date June 7, 2024 Director Richard Linklater Runtime 113 minutes Main Genre Romantic Comedy Studio(s) Aggregate Films , AGC Studios , BarnStorm Productions , Detour Filmproduction Distributor(s) Netflix Expand

‘Hit Man’ Focuses on the Most Entertaining Aspects of Gary Johnson’s Career
As a film adapting the life of a man who had many personas, the most enjoyable aspect of Hit Man is the fun it has with Gary Johnson’s undercover aliases. Scenes with Powell in disguise allow the film to reference iconic killers like Christian Bale’s Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, but the majority of these encounters are played for their absurdity. While the movie does put Johnson’s freedom in danger when a corrupt police officer, Jasper (Austin Amelio), threatens to put him in jail later in the movie, the undercover agent’s daily run-ins with New Orleans’ would-be killers never result in any injury to Powell’s character. Most of these meetings in Hit Man end in an arrest, whereas the real-life Gary Johnson’s work occasionally became much more dangerous.

Hollandsworth’s article explains that Johnson was shot during an arrest in 1986, receiving wounds to his left leg and incapacitating the highly successful operative for a week. In a separate incident approximately a decade later, Johnson’s undercover persona worked a little too well. A used-car salesperson and his neighbor were referred to one of Johnson’s fake hitmen when the salesperson claimed he wanted to murder his wife, but when the salesperson later reneged on a promise for payment, the man who would inspire Powell’s master of disguise threatened to report him to the police. As a result, the salesperson and the neighbor began fighting, and by the time the police arrived, the salesperson was bleeding from a gunshot wound on the tailgate of his pickup truck, demonstrating that sometimes Johnson’s stings got out of hand in a brutal way.

The Real-Life ‘Hit Man’ Dealt With High-Profile Cases
Image via Netflix

Likewise, the real Gary Johnson’s repertoire sometimes reached more distressing levels of power than even the movie portrays. Hollandsworth’s article alludes to Johnson’s most high-profile case, where the real-life counterpart to Powell’s Hit Man collected evidence that Lynn Kilroy, a prominent Republican official in Houston (where the real Gary Johnson actually operated), was trying to have her husband murdered. The former vice president of a Republican group for Houston women, Lynn’s husband was set to inherit a large fortune, so Johnson’s intervention naturally would have put him in the crosshairs of powerful public figures if his identity had been revealed. Instead, Johnson managed to maintain his anonymity and continue braving encounters as dangerous as these for decades to come.

Related How ‘Hit Man’ Gave Us One of the Best Scenes of the Year Make sure your phone is charged.

While Hit Man adapts some of the circumstances from the cases Hollandsworth mentions, the movie also often softens the details of Johnson’s interactions with his clients in order to maintain its more upbeat tone. Powell’s first interaction with a client in the film, for example, is taken directly from Hollandsworth’s description of a man who wanted a murder committed while he was off the coast on an oil rig, while the police also received real tips for Johnson from sex workers like they do in the movie. In another case, Glen Powell’s Johnson is enlisted by a teenager, Monte (Jonas Lerway), to murder his mom. In real life, this character is based off Houston teen Shawn Quinn, who instead wanted Johnson to kill his classmate in exchange for computer games, but moving away from the proposition of teenage murder is far from the only way Hit Man allows Johnson’s life to change.

Linklater and Powell Reinvent the Saddest Parts of Gary Johnson’s Personal Life

Most of Hit Man takes inspiration directly from the absurd circumstances of Gary Johnson’s real stings, with the movie making alterations only to fit its entertaining narrative. Aside from glossing over some of the darker targets that the fake hit man’s clients fed him over the years, such as the killing of a baby for a life insurance policy, many of the encounters featured in the film actually happened to some degree. A woman really did try to buy Gary Johnson’s fake services by offering her boat as payment, and the real Johnson did, in fact, help rescue a woman from an abusive relationship. Yet, instead of entering into a Hollywood romance with this woman as Glen Powell does in Hit Man, the real Gary Johnson’s life appears to have been distant and lonely.

Rather than sleeping with her and eventually committing murder, Gary Johnson simply referred the real-life inspiration behind Hit Man’s Madison Masters (Adria Arjona) to the proper resources, so she could get into a women’s shelter. Hollandsworth’s article also states that the real Gary Johnson had been married and divorced three times, illustrating the man’s personal struggle with intimacy. Hit Man refers to this struggle through the character of Alicia (Molly Bernard), who is also Johnson’s ex-wife in the film, but Johnson’s real-life second wife, Sunny, goes deeper into Johnson’s struggles in the original story. She claims that “the true essence” of Gary Johnson is that “of a loner” in the article, explaining that Johnson was quiet during his life and preferred solitude to parties.

‘Hit Man’ Puts a Dark Twist on Gary Johnson’s Story
Image via Netflix

Hit Man takes more than a few liberties with Gary Johnson’s life story, but the biggest has to be the ending. Madison initially contacts Gary to kill her husband Ray (Evan Holtzman). Gary refuses, but then when Ray is shot he pieces together that Madison did it. He’s able to help her talk her way out of being arrested, but another police officer, Jasper, correctly deduces that Madison was behind the shooting thanks to a hefty life insurance policy Ray took out on himself. When Jasper ends up attempting to blackmail Gary and Madison, Madison drugs him and Gary suffocates him by placing a plastic bag over his head.

This never happened in real life. In fact, the real-life Gary Johnson never murdered anyone. Most of the “assignments” he took usually ended in the arrest of the person who contacted him — even the film’s ending labels him as “an animal-loving Buddhist, a Vietnam War veteran and the chilliest dude imaginable.” It also fits perfectly with Linklater’s approach to the story of the real life Gary Johnson. “I kind of enjoy deconstructing and debunking,” he said when Hit Man was first announced. Well, a twist that dark is a pretty big deconstruction for a romantic comedy.

‘Hit Man’s Real Gary Johnson Often Felt Isolated
Image via Netflix 

The real Johnson’s unconventional job also contributed to his difficulty with human intimacy, as Hollandsworth’s conversations with the inspiration behind Hit Man depict a man who maintained a healthy distance from humanity. As someone who regularly interacted with the darkest elements of human relationships, Johnson didn’t feel compelled to let anyone get too close to his own life, and his real-life background in human psychology made it difficult to form trusted bonds with strangers. Instead of marrying the woman he helped to save and going on to raise a loving family like in the movie, the real-life Gary Johnson passed away in 2022, leaving behind a colorful cast of fictional hitmen and over 70 arrests in his wake.

Linklater’s film is therefore not a strict retelling of Johnson’s life so much as it is a reinvention of what could have been. By selectively choosing to focus on the most entertaining aspects of the man’s career and spinning his personal life into a made-for-movie romance, Richard Linklater and Glen Powell’s script gives Johnson’s legacy the grandiose treatment that his characters always imitated, paying their respects to the man by creating the same over-the-top narrative that always entrapped his clients. Using the power of storytelling to break new ground on a pre-existing biography, Linklater and Powell take a page out of Johnson’s book beautifully, creating a happy ending for the man who chose not to end so many people’s lives.

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

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