Glen Powell as Gary Johnson in The Hitman Photo: Netflix
There are currently several films that would more vigorously watchable. than Richard Linklater's The Hitman. Not only does it feature a charismatic performance from Glen Powell, who is quickly becoming a bona fide movie star, as that and the lead role in Twisters are imminent, but it is also based on a brilliantly original premise: what if someone pretended to be a professional killer in order to lure out the villains? desperate or otherwise corrupt so that they would hire him and then turn them over to the police once the deal was done?
It may sound like the fantasy of a well-paid Hollywood screenwriter (the film's witty, twist-filled script was actually written by Linklater and Powell), but Hitman owes its (apparent) verisimilitude to the true story of Gary Johnson. an outwardly mild-mannered man who, under strange circumstances, moonlighted as a pseudo-assassin at the behest of the District Attorney's Office in Houston, Texas.
«Killer,» which bills itself in the opening credits as a «partially true story,» is based on an article by journalist Skip Hollandsworth in the October 2001 issue of Texas Monthly. This is a very interesting, somewhat exaggerated version of the strange but true story of the man Hollandsworth calls «the Laurence Olivier of [his] field.»
Born in 1947, Johnson spent a quiet, uneventful childhood in Louisiana before spending a year in Vietnam, although as a military policeman rather than a fighter. Although Hitman suggests that Johnson held an academic position as a psychology professor, it was a cinematic flourish. Instead, after returning from Vietnam, he worked for a time as a sheriff's deputy and discovered his hitherto untapped acting talents.
Most successfully, he managed to impersonate a drug buyer. “I don’t think the drug dealers ever suspected that I could be a police officer because my character was very strange to begin with,” he once said. While it's true that he took night classes at McNeese State University and eventually earned a master's degree in psychology, he never pursued it seriously as a career. Instead, he took a job as an investigator at the local prosecutor's office.
Aside from being shot in a 1986 shooting, his career had been quiet and uneventful. As Johnson says in the film, «I know my life looks simple on the surface — a man living alone with his cats in the suburbs.» As fate would have it, Johnson's life got considerably more interesting in 1989. While Hit Man somewhat distorts the connection between Johnson's professional and extracurricular personas, he had in fact been working quietly for years until one day, when local police learned that there was a woman, Katie Scott, who wanted to «terminate» her husband in order to collect on his life insurance policy and various other benefits.
The real Gary Johnson, who died in 2022
The prosecutor's office invited the modest Johnson to pose as a killer, and, taking the pseudonym «Mike Cain» and the appearance of a biker, he came to a meeting with Scott. They hit it off, flirted, and she confirmed that she would pay him to kill her husband. Police arrived moments later and Scott was later sentenced to 80 years in prison.
Although the film suggests that it all happened almost by accident — «my life took the strangest turns» — when Johnson was forced to replace an unwell colleague who had been suspended from duty after he was filmed beating up teenagers (Hitman is set in In this day and age where such things can become a sensation on YouTube) it actually wasn't as unlikely as it first seemed. After all, Johnson had a long history of service in both the military and police.
However, the film brilliantly and accurately depicts how this mild-mannered, solitary man, once his credentials were confirmed, became a wannabe hitman. Hollandsworth's article described his unconventional life in a «nice, quiet neighborhood» in Houston, where Johnson was polite but a bit distant with his neighbors and told them only that he worked in human resources. However, in his bedroom there was a black telephone from which he received very specific calls — all of them began with the words: “We have something for you. New client».
Glenn Powell as Gary Johnson in the movie «Killer» Photo: Netflix
Incredibly, many of the most outlandish touches in Linklater's film come from reality. Whenever Johnson met a new client, often but not exclusively at a diner or other restaurant, he would begin the meeting with a code word revolving around pie, depicted in Hit Man as «all pies are good pies.» He visited one particular department so many times on behalf of his killer that the district attorney only half-jokingly suggested naming a plaque in his honor. And as soon as he was in the diner, all human life came to him, wanting only the disappearance of those who were bothering them. In total, Johnson is rumored to be responsible for more than 60 arrests.
The film's opening montage, designed for uproarious comic effect, reveals the kind of people eager to hire Johnson, from a wealthy middle-aged would-be widow who promises him very personal favors if he succeeds in eliminating her husband, to an angry teenager who offers Johnson a mixture of money and video games if he keeps his mother for himself.
In fact, Johnson was so skilled at his job that he was able to fool Lynn Kilroy, a grand dame from Houston who was married to an oil billionaire, into thinking he was a high-class assassin. Kilroy, who had been married only a year, already hated her husband and wanted to leave him, but was afraid that he would vindictively try to take their little child away from her in a custody battle. So what could be better than an anonymous, charming hitman known only as Chris? She gave him $200,000 worth of jewelry as a down payment on the murder, and his last words to her were: «You will become a widow.» She was arrested and sentenced to five years probation.
Early in the film, Johnson says that «there are no hitmen,» before a montage of cinema's most iconic—or brutal—hitmen doing their jobs. While there have been enough cases of people paying others to commit murders for it to be untrue, the film has a lot of fun playing with the complexities of Johnson's dual personality while acknowledging the impact his antics had on law enforcement.
In real life, he philosophized rather than judged the people who tried to hire him. “They are all looking for a quick fix, which has become the American way,” he said. “Today people can pay to fix their TVs and take out their trash, so why can’t they pay me, a hitman, to fix their lives?”
Johnson was an avid student of Carl Jung, who theorized that all people had a dark element that could be released from within: what he called the “shadow side.” On top of that, Johnson had two other cats named Id and Ego. The film presents this quite literally, suggesting that the division between Johnson arises from his real identity as a bespectacled nerdy lecturer and his perceived identity as the suave, charismatic assassin known as Ron. Over time, Ron's image replaces his dull academic persona, giving him additional authority and attractiveness in class.
However, the real Johnson did not have such a devil-may-care character, but was a thrice-divorced loner who admitted to his cynical view of human nature. He admitted to Hollandsworth that his work had given him «a rather depressing view of human life» and that when he was looking around a Mexican restaurant, wondering who might be his next customer, «I think it would be fair to say that I don't let a lot of people getting too close.»
Adria Arjona and Glen Powell in the movie “Hitman”. Credit: Netflix
The film adds many dramatic inventions, and most importantly, Johnson's romantic involvement with a potential client, Adria Ajona's Madison Masters, who attempts to hire him to kill her husband, but ends up doing the job herself after a smitten Johnson refuses to get involved. . While this scene—and a later scene in which Johnson and Masters team up to kill his suspicious colleague and make it look like an accident, thereby clearing her name—are good old-fashioned Hollywood invention, Johnson did have a sentimental side.
Madison's story was inspired by an incident in Hollandsworth's profile in which Johnson, who was visited by a desperate woman who was being beaten by an abusive boyfriend, made sure she got help from therapy and social services rather than being arrested. When Hallsworth jokingly suggested that «Houston's greatest hitman just went soft,» Johnson replied, «Just this one time.» However, while watching Powell's not-so-tenacious hitman apply his skills to a very deserving victim is immensely satisfying and immensely satisfying, the end credits make it clear that the real Johnson, who died in 2022, is year, married and divorced three times, was not only a practicing Buddhist, but also «the coolest dude you can imagine — no murder (we made that up).»
“I think [Johnson] would be confused by this movie,” Linklater said recently. “What we took is far beyond his own life.” While many people would be delighted to commemorate one of Hollywood's brightest stars in such a charming and charismatic manner, Hitman remains a highly entertaining blend of loosely embellished fact and cleverly crafted fiction. But the real Johnson, that unique combination of professorial aloofness and fast-paced acting skill, was a man so unusual and compelling that, to quote Olivier from Hamlet, “we shall never see his like again.”
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