‘Hit Man’ Leaves Out the Darkest Parts of the Real-Life Story That Inspired It

The big picture

• Hit Man
  is a sexy, dangerous and funny romantic comedy that balances laughs with emotions.
• The real Gary Johnson faced more danger than the portrayal of Glen Powell.
• Linklater and Powell's film reinvents Johnson's life, turning it into a romantic comedy with exaggerated details.

Hit Manthe director's last film Richard Linklater and A-List star Glen Powell, is a rare gem of a release currently arriving on Netflix. Balancing the understated qualities of Linklater's films as Childhood with the outgoing charisma of its protagonist, the film follows a fictional account of the life of Gary Johnsonan undercover police officer who poses as a series of hitmen in order to extract confessions from potential murder clients. Hit Man is as oddly funny as it is sexy, injecting humor and intrigue into its protagonist's tedious life, though the life of the real Gary Johnson includes even more elements of danger and sadness.

Loosely based on the 2001 Texas Monthly article “Hit Man” by Skip Hollandsworth, the film takes great liberties to keep his story entertaining, painting the portrait of a man whose life becomes infinitely more interesting when he pretends to be someone else. Co-written by Linklater and Powell, the film features 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 rom-com, a crime thriller with echoes. of Bonnie and Clydeand the calm tone of comedies like walk In the process, Linklater and Powell elevate the tone of Johnson's own story, giving the man a film truly worthy of his many eccentric characters.

“Hit Man” focuses on the most entertaining aspects of Gary Johnson's career

As a film that adapts the life of a man who had many people, the nicest aspect of Hit Man it's the fun he has with Gary Johnson's undercover aliases. Scenes with Powell in disguise allow the film to reference iconic killers such as Christian Bale's Patrick Bateman enters American Psycho, but most of these encounters are played for their absurdity. Although the film puts Johnson's freedom in jeopardy when a corrupt police officer, Jasper (Austin Amelio), threatens to land him in jail later in the film, the undercover agent's daily run-ins with would-be assassins in New Orleans never results in any injury to Powell's character. Most of these meetings a Hit Man end with an arrest, while Gary Johnson's real-life job occasionally became much more dangerous.

Hollandsworth's article explains 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 about a decade later, Johnson's undercover persona worked a bit too well A used car salesman and his neighbor were referred to one of Johnson's fake hitmen when the salesman claimed he wanted to kill his wife, but when the salesman later reneged on the promise of payment, the man who would inspire Powell's master of disguise threatened to report him to the police. As a result, the seller and the neighbor began to fight, and when the police arrived, the seller was bleeding from a gunshot wound to the back door of his pickup truck, indicating that at times, Johnson's jabs went wildly out of control.

The real-life 'Hit Man' handled high-profile cases

Similarly, Gary Johnson's real-life repertoire sometimes reached levels of power more distressing than even the film. Hollandsworth's article alludes to Johnson's most prominent casewhere the real-life counterpart to Powell's Hit Man he collected evidence that Lynn Kilroy, a prominent Republican official in Houston (where the real Gary Johnson actually operated), was trying to have her husband assassinated. The former vice president of a Republican women's group in Houston, Lynn's husband was due to inherit a large fortune, so Johnson's intervention would naturally 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 to struggle with encounters as dangerous as these for decades to come.

while Hit Man adapts some of the circumstances of the cases mentioned by Hollandsworth, the The film also often glosses over the details of Johnson's interactions with his clients 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 to commit a murder while offshore on an oil rig, while the police also he received real advice for Johnson from female sex workers. like they do in the movie. In another case, Glen Powell's Johnson is recruited by a teenager, Monte (Jonas Lerway), to murder his mother. In real life, this character is based on a teenager from Houston Shawn Quinnthat instead he wanted Johnson to kill his classmate in exchange for computer games, but walking away from the proposition of killing teenagers is away from the only path Hit Man allows Johnson's life to change.

Linklater and Powell reinvent the saddest parts of Gary Johnson's personal life

Most of the Hit Man is directly inspired by the absurd circumstances of Gary Johnson's real-life stabbings, with the film making tweaks just to fit its entertaining narrative. Aside from glossing over some of the darker goals the fake hitman's clients fed him over the years, like killing a baby for a life insurance policy.many of the encounters featured in the film actually happened to a certain extent. A woman actually tried to buy the bogus services of Gary Johnson by offering his boat as payment, and the real Johnson did, in fact, help rescue a woman from an abusive relationship. However, instead of entering into a Hollywood romance with this woman as Glen Powell does Hit Man, the life of the real Gary Johnson seems to have been distant and lonely.

Instead of sleeping with her and ultimately committing murder, Gary Johnson simply referred to the real-life inspiration behind Hit Man's Madison Masters (Adria Arjona) to the right resources, so that she could enter a shelter for women. Hollandsworth's article says so too the real Gary Johnson had been married and divorced three timeswhich illustrates 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, delves into Johnson's struggles in the original story. He states 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.

“The real Gary Johnson of Hit Man often felt isolated

The unconventional work of the real Johnson also contributed to his difficulty with human intimacy, as Hollandsworth's conversations with the inspiration behind it. Hit Man they represent a man who kept a good distance from humanity. As someone who regularly interacts with the darker elements of human relationshipsJohnson 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 trusting bonds with strangers. Instead of marrying the woman he helped save and going on to start a loving family like in the movie, the real-life Gary Johnson died in 2022leaving behind a colorful cast of fictional hitmen and more than seventy arrests in his wake.

Linklater's film is therefore not a strict narrative of Johnson's life it is a reinvention of what could have been. By selectively choosing to focus on the more entertaining aspects of the man's career and transforming his personal life into a made-for-movie romance, Richard Linklater and Glen Powell's screenplay gives Johnson's legacy the grandiose treatment that his characters always imitated, paying homage to him. the man creating the same exaggerated narrative that always ensnared his customers. Using the power of storytelling to break new ground in a pre-existing biography, Linklater and Powell take a page out of Johnson's book wonderfully, creating a happy ending for the man who chose not to end the lives of so many people.

Hit Man is available to watch on Netflix in the US

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