Netflix is always aiming to surprise us with its film offerings, whether through unpleasant terror, starry cameos, or simply how much people would watch films that are not very good.
However, this partnership between director Richard Linklater and Hollywood’s favourite almost-famous leading man Glen Powell is quite different.
For in Hit Man, they have not only brought a violent little rom-com to streaming, which has pleased many critics.
It is being labelled everything from a “full original” to a “flick that keeps you on your toes,” and it now has a 97% rating on review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes.
But it’s also, as the film’s synopsis emphasises, ‘inspired by an unbelievable true story’.
And everyone knows how much we love a ‘real-life’ basis for a movie.
‘Vietnam vet, college teacher, undercover agent (over 70 arrests), animal-loving Buddhist, chillest dude imaginable.’
That is how Linklater and Powell attribute his character of Gary Johnson – or, more accurately, who the real Johnson was.
Powell stars in Hit Man as dorky professor Johnson, who also moonlights as a hit man for his municipal police department.
He is seen becoming dragged deeper and deeper into his part, portraying up to 40 different ‘assassin’ characters, one of whom has the unique aura of actor Tilda Swinton and another who resembles Harry Potter figure Severus Snape.
However, he enters perilous, doubtful ground when he becomes drawn to a woman (Adria Arjona) who enlists his help.
The tone of Hit Man swings between noir, gore and goofy, with a pretty high body count of wince-inducing slayings and some pretty steamy scenes between Powell and Arjona, thanks to their sizzling chemistry.
How much of it though, is actually true – and where is the real Gary Johnson now?
Well, the film cops to taking a fair amount of creative licence with its killings, admitting: ‘Zero murders (we made that part up).’
It doesn’t make the real Gary Johnson’s story any less engrossing though.
Hit Man was actually based on a 2001 Texas Monthly article that Linklater read, introducing Johnson’s unique work and background, and explaining how he ended up working as a fake hit man for the police in his area.
He had been so successful in his role, the article reveals, that he had been hired by more than 60 Houston-area residents ‘to shoot, stab, chop, poison, or suffocate their enemies, their romantic rivals, or their former loved ones’.
The publication even dubbed him ‘the Laurence Olivier of the field’ for his flawless acting skills in persuading each of the people from whom cops needed to hear the order to kill before prosecuting.
In his everyday life, Johnson was an avid gardener, a classical music aficionado, and a psychology graduate who taught evening classes and resided with his two cats, Ego and Id (who appear in the film).
Johnson had slipped into his specialised line of work in 1989, when a random murder-for-hire case came his way while working as an investigator for the district attorney’s office; this was the first time he rolled out his ‘badass biker’ hit man image, Mike Caine.
These would-be killers he was seeing ranged from wealthy to working-class, young and old, and included everyone from a lab technician to an oil rig worker to a 61-year-old churchgoer intent on murdering her spouse.
She was one of the clutch who became infatuated with one of Johnson’s assassin alter-egos, even suggesting to him that ‘they perform a certain sex act on the hood of her Cadillac’.
‘What I’m really there to do is assist people in their communication skills,’ Johnson told Texas Monthly at the time, of his specialist job.
‘That’s all my job is – to help people open up, to get them to say what they really want, to reveal to me their deepest desires.’
Unsurprisingly, Linklater stated in the film’s production notes that this piece has always stayed with him; it was also written by a childhood buddy from Texas, journalist Skip Hollandsworth.
The Before Sunrise filmmaker ended up engaging naturally with fellow Texan Powell, 35, on the screenplay for Hit Man, having previously worked with when the Top Gun: Maverick star was a teenager for 2006’s Fast Food Nation.
Powell was brought to the piece separately by producer Michael Costigan, who immediately nominated Linklater as the filmmaker who would best explore this subject with him.
The duo combed through decades of Johnson’s real police debriefs to flesh out their leading man, meeting all the different fake hit men that he created – with Powell praising him as a ‘compelling actor’ despite, in real life, being someone they would ignore and not ‘even know he was in the room’.
‘Then he would put on these personas and the people listening couldn’t believe who was on the other end,’ Powell explains in Hit Man’s production notes. ‘We got to listen to some of those tapes. And they are not Gary Johnson. And that’s the most fascinating part: Who is that guy and why does he come alive here?’
Sadly, the real-life Johnson died in 2022, a week before the film began shooting, and Hit Man is dedicated to his memory.
Linklater met and spoke with him as his lone connection to the project – though Powell hopes they could have met as well, considering Linklater’s regard for him.
‘We were creating a moment in time for Gary, not where he is now,’ the actor observed, though. ‘Sometimes when you meet the real-life people, you meet them in a different phase of their life and it can taint who they used to be.’
They were also making a film with their own version of Johnson, making him out to be a real-life killer, which he wasn’t, as well as drawing inspiration from one of his true clients – a woman who was in danger from her ex-husband and was attempting to put a hit out on him before she was killed herself.
Perhaps unexpectedly, Arjona’s performance as Madison served as the thread Powell and Linklater used to weave the film’s sexual, romantic element – as well as much of its dark comedy – together.
This is what actually distinguishes Hit Man as a genre-bending, seductive noir romance and violent thriller comedy.
Hit Man is streaming now on Netflix.
Source My Celebrity Life.
