Glen Powell is on a roll. His new film Hit Man is even hotter and more acclaimed than his box-office sleeper hit with Sydney Sweeney, Anyone but You.
Hit Man, however, is especially near and dear to the actor, since he co-wrote the script alongside director and frequent collaborator Richard Linklater in what was one of his first writing ventures ever. Based on an article published in Texas Monthly back in 2001, the film fictionalizes the life of Gary Johnson, a philosophy professor working part-time as a fake hitman for the police to catch criminals.
Linklater and Powell’s screenplay mixes action thriller with screwball comedy and romance for an impossibly entertaining combination that proves mid-budget, fun, hearty movies are everything the industry needs right now.
How does Hit Man end?
After a slew of very successful meetings and arrests, Gary Johnson slips up for the first time when Madison (Adria Arjona), a beautiful woman, broken and caged by an abusive relationship, tries to hire him (as his hunky, confident hitman persona named Ron) to kill her husband. Believing she doesn’t actually want to see anyone get killed, Gary convinces her to use the money she had reserved for the job to turn her life around instead.
Madison eventually contacts Gary/Ron again and the two start a high-risk relationship, with her under the impression that he is actually the dangerous hitman he says he is. Later on, after the two run into Madison’s ex-husband, the man tries to hire Gary to kill the pair, unaware he is the boyfriend he had previously met.
When Gary/Ron tells Madison about the meeting, she reassures him that her husband will never kill her himself, only to turn around and kill him herself. Gary/Ron is shocked when he finds out and finally tells her about his double identity, but is pushed into a corner when the police start suspecting Madison.
Meanwhile, the guy who used to do Gary’s job, Jasper (Austin Amelio), and had run into the couple when they were out on a date, starts suspecting his partner despite the latter’s best efforts to put him off their scent. Even after the police ask Gary to try and get a taped confession out of Madison and he successfully gets her to lie to him in a brilliant display of their acting chops, Jasper is still not convinced and decides to pay the woman a visit.
Jasper asks for the dead husband’s life insurance money in exchange for his silence, but Madison drugs his beer, rendering him unconscious. Scared the policeman will wake up and the two will be in even deeper [insert the more vulgar synonym of “excrements” here], Gary, who hadn’t actually killed anyone yet, completes his final transformation into Ron and wraps a plastic bag around Jasper’s head, leading him to slowly suffocate to death.
The equally psychotic couple disposes of the body and stages Jasper’s death as a suicide. Years later, they are living out their unorthodox happily ever after. They now have two children, a boy and a girl, Gary has become an amalgam of his two identities (inside you there are two wolves, etc.), and is still teaching. When their daughter asks them how they met, they embellish the truth, telling her they met at a café and that it was love at first sight (somewhat true), but leaving out all other morally questionable details. Yeah, because that will definitely go down better when she’s 18.
