Netflix’s newest film is Hit Man, starring Glen Powell (Picture: Netflix)
Netflix is always looking to surprise us with its film offerings, be that courtesy of upsetting horror, starry cameos or just how much people will watch movies that really aren’t very good.
But this collaboration between director Richard Linklater and Hollywood’s favourite almost-minted leading man Glen Powell is something else entirely.
For in Hit Man, they’ve not only introduced a murderous new rom-com to streaming, which has tickled many critics.
It’s been dubbed everything from ‘a complete original’ to a movie ‘that keeps you on your toes’ and currently sits on an impressive rating of 97% on review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes.
But it’s also, as the film’s synopsis stresses, ‘inspired by an unbelievable true story’.
And everyone knows how much we love a ‘real-life’ tale.
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Hit Man – a true story?
‘Vietnam vet, college teacher, undercover agent (over 70 arrests), animal-loving Buddhist, chillest dude imaginable.’
That’s how Linklater and Powell credit his character of Gary Johnson – or at least, who the real Johnson actually was.
In Hit Man, Powell plays nerdy professor Johnson, who also moonlights as a hit man of sorts for his city police department.
He’s seen getting sucked further and further into his role – playing up to 40 different ‘assassin’ characters, one of whom has the distinct aura of actor Tilda Swinton while another looks distinctly like Harry Potter character Severus Snape.
But he descends into dangerous territory when he finds himself attracted to a woman (Adria Arjona) who enlists his services.
Powell is playing Gary Johnson, a real-life fake assassin in the movie (Picture: Netflix)
He is seen in about 40 different hit man guises as he helps the police (Picture: Netflix)
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, their sizzling chemistry on full display.
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’.
Johnson’s remarkable true story was explored back in 2001 in a local Texas publication (Picture: Brian Roedel/Netflix)
The publication even dubbed him ‘the Laurence Olivier of the field’ for his impeccable acting skills in convincing each of the people from whom cops needed to hear the order to kill from their lips in order to prosecute.
During his normal day-to-day life though, Johnson was a keen gardener, a classical music fan and a psychology graduate who taught evening classes and lived with his two cats, Ego and Id (who make it into the movie).
Johnson had fallen into his specific line of work in 1989 when a random murder-for-hire case came his way after being employed as an investigator for the district attorney’s office – this was the fist time he rolled out his ‘badass biker’ hit man persona, Mike Caine.
These would-be killers he was meeting ranged from wealthy to working class, young and old and everything from a lab technician to an oil rig worker to a 61-year-old churchgoing woman intent on killing her husband.
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’.
Powell, who also co-wrote the script with director Richard Linklater (R), and leading lady Adria Arjona (C) (Picture: Getty)
Arjona and Powell share a sizzling chemistry as Johnson is beguiled by one of his clients (Picture: Netflix)
‘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 shared in the film’s production notes that this piece ‘always stuck with me’; it was also written by a childhood friend of his from Texas, journalist Skip Hollandsworth.
It was fellow Texan Powell, 35, who the Before Sunrise director ended up collaborating with organically on the screenplay for Hit Man, having first worked together when the Top Gun: Maverick star was a teenager for 2006’s Fast Food Nation.
Powell had been introduced to the article separately by producer Michael Costigan – nominating Linklater straight away as the filmmaker he thought would explore this idea best with him.
Linklater was the only person to meet the real-life Gary Johnson (Picture: Getty)
Another of the individual ‘hit man’ characters Powell’s Gary Johnson has on offer (Picture: Netflix)
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 started shooting, with Hit Man dedicated to his memory.
Linklater met and spoke with him, as his deliberate sole connection with the production – although Powell wishes they could have met too, given the ‘reverence’ Linklater held for him.
Hit Man is a genre-bending film offering a little of everything and a unique tone (Picture: Brian Roedel/Netflix)
‘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, building him out into a real-life killer, which he wasn’t, as well as well as pulling on a thread of inspiration from one of his true clients – a woman who was in danger from her ex-husband, trying to put a hit out on him before she could be killed herself.
Perhaps unexpectedly, this was the thread Powell and Linklater pulled to create the movie’s sexy, romantic element – as well as lot of its dark comedy – thanks to Arjona’s performance as Madison.
And it’s this that truly makes Hit Man the genre-bending, steamy noir-romance and violent-thriller comedy that it is.
Hit Man is streaming now on Netflix.
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