Hit Man explained

What is Hit Man about?

Hit Man shares a lot of themes with Fight Club but is much more happy-go-lucky and for a wider audience. The various hitmen personas that Gary adapts are part of a journey to change for the better. Ron is his Tyler Durden—the version of himself Gary wishes he could be. Hit Man asks if its possible for someone to change their personality then proves that, yes, you can. The major sub-theme deals with the idea of passion and what it means to find someone or something you’re passionate about and how that can transform your life. It also explores relationship dynamics and not letting your past define you. 

Cast

• Gary Johnson – Glen Powell
• Madison Figueroa Masters – Adria Arjona
• Jasper – Austin Amelio
• Claudette – Retta
• Phil – Sanjay Rao
• Ray – Evan Holtzman
• Alicia – Molly Bernard
• Based on – “Hit Man” by Skip Hollandsworth
• Written by – Richard Linklater | Glen Powell
• Directed by – Richard Linklater

Hit Man is about identity, same as Fight Club

I actually find it pretty illuminating to put Hit Man into conversation with Fight Club. Granted, it doesn’t wage an all-out war on capitalism and consumerism like Fincher did, but there’s a similarity in what it says about identity. 

In Fight Club, The Narrator, Edward Norton, is the “real” person. And Tyler Durden, Brad Pitt, is the fantasy. As Durden explains to The Narrator, “I look like you wanna look. I f*** like you wanna f***. I am smart, capable, and, most importantly, I’m free in all the ways that you are not.” 

That’s the same dynamic Gary has with Ron. Gary lives an isolated, boring, life. He doesn’t inspire his students. His coworkers like him but don’t want to hang out with him. His wife divorced him because he lacked passion. He uses his role as a hitman as a way to escape himself. To explore different identities and personalities. He looks different, talks different, acts different. And each time it affects his idea of “Gary”. 

Conversation 1

Linklater makes this concept explicit about 24 minutes into the film. During a class Gary says: 

Believe me, we will get to all of this eventually, but let me jump in and pose a question ‘cause I think it’s going to be a lot of what we’re going to be exploring this semester, these concepts of personality, self, and consciousness. So, my simple question is…How many of you think you know yourselves? Have a strong sense of who you are? Oh, come on, you don’t know yourselves? Of course you do. Your entire being is invested with this notion of self. It has to be for its own survival, but what we’ll be doing this semester is challenging this notion. What if your “self” is a construction? An illusion, an act, a role you’ve been playing every day since you can remember? 

Conversation 2

We then cut to the conversation Gary has with his ex, Alicia. This puts a much finer point on the whole thing. 

Putting it together

Because movies don’t have an omniscient narrator, dialogue is the most common way filmmakers convey necessary thematic information like this. It’s different from exposition as exposition typically refers to backstory or plot context. Like one character saying to another “Remember when we first met? It was Mr. Howard’s 11th grade English class.” Or “But it’s always been your dream to be a doctor.”  

The amount of thematic dialogue is typically what separates a more mainstream film from a more “artistic” one versus a children’s movie. For example, Aladdin is also about identity and someone changing their notion of self. Aladdin is a poor young man who wants to be good enough for the princess. So he pretends to be Prince Ali. Because it’s a movie for kids, it uses dialogue and straightforward character dynamics (street rat compared to princess) to make sure everyone can easily follow along.

On the other end of the spectrum, you have Fight Club. It still has dialogue that conveys to viewers that the movie is about identity, capitalism, consumerism, masculinity, etc. But it’s more selective and limited in the deployment of such lines. And often relies on mise-en-scene, juxtaposition, and other literary techniques to fully develop those ideas. 

Hit Man lands in the middle. It’s not for kids, so the story doesn’t have to spell things out so much. But it’s for a broad audience, so it threads in the class lectures with moments like the conversation with Alicia to make sure people can pick up on the gist of the thematics. It even goes the extra mile of having the closing dialogue where Gary says lines like “Seize the identity you want for yourself.” As well as “As love can do, somewhere along the way, it changed me. I eventually found the proper cocktail of Gary and Ron.”

The second half of the movie, you really do start to see Gary becoming more like Ron. He changes his clothes. His hair. How he talks. How he teaches. And the biggest thing: he kills Jasper.

Gary suffocates Jasper. Murder as a metaphor for passion.

Some people might think it’s weird that both Madison and Gary end up killing people. How are we supposed to root for them when they’re arguably the most evil characters in the movie? I have good news—you shouldn’t take what the couple did literally.

Why? Because movies are often hyperbolic dramatizations of real life. What happens is for entertainment. Why it happens is more important. There’s actually dialogue in the movie that gives us the realistic, everyday idea of what’s going on. Let’s go back to the conversation between Alicia and Gary. 

We’re also told that Gary lacked passion. So much of his time as Ron was about getting in touch with the passionate side of himself. The physical and emotional intimacy he shared with Madison was part of that. But Linklater told us through Alicia that the “true” sign of passion is murder. Even though Gary as Ron was a lot more passionate, he was still, in many ways, pretending. 

That’s why when he puts the bag over Jasper’s head, his response to Madison’s question is a single word: commitment. Metaphorically, he’s committing to passion. To being less Gary and more Ron. To being a partner to Madison, who has already demonstrated how “passionate” she can be. 

There are dozens of examples of more grounded, realism-based rom coms, where a guy has commitment issues, gets in a fight with the love interest about it, then makes a big gesture to prove he’s ready for the relationship. That’s what’s going on here. It says the same thing but in a more absurd way. 

We return to Alicia for more dialogue that grounds the events of the film. 

Alicia: What is normal? I mean, look at it this way, everyone is at least a little f***ed up. You just need to find someone who is a little f***ed up in a way that you like. Or at least, I don’t know, in a way that complements your own f***ed-upness.

Hit Man is a great example of taking a general truth about life and exaggerating it for dramatic effect. The beats are familiar in a way where people can relate. But the actual events are outrageous enough to entertain. 

But that’s why we see Gary and Madison in the future, living a really basic, normal life. It serves to destigmatize this idea that you’re not good enough to live well. Most people have a dramatic or embarrassing period in their life, some kind of flaw they’re trying to improve, a failure they feel guilty about. That doesn’t mean you won’t find someone who accepts you and that you can’t go on to be a happy couple, great parents, and positive members of society. Again, the movie exaggerates all of this for entertainment. But it’s based on very common, relatable experiences.

Just to put a final point on it…Linklater did an interview with Netflix, and he said: I just love that the guy who couldn’t get worked up enough to kill or die for anything, by the end, [he’s] doing it for love…. I love the power of cinema. You kind of throw your moral compass in the river and just go with it. The film noir rules would be usually [that you wind up] dead, or in prison, or reduced, or [there’s] something you’ve paid for your sins. So we thought it’s kind of more darkly funny to get away with it. More screwball comedy for sure. So I thought that was a better resolution, more hopeful, optimistic.   

How do Madison and Gary get away with killing Jasper?

We see over the course of the film that while the police are capable they’re not extraordinary. They did ask a college professor to play the role of a hitman in sting operations. Like…that’s not good. The evidence isn’t great. But then we have the whole scene where Gary goes in as Ron, with the wire on, and coaches Madison on what to say to convince the listening cops that she had nothing to do with it. Her performance is good enough that they rule her out as a suspect. 

What happens to Jasper?

Muerte. Because Madison drugged his beer, Jasper’s completely unconscious and can’t react to the plastic bag over his head. You can see through the course of the scene that the bag loses oxygen and tightens over his face. Eventually, he suffocates. What happens next? Near the start of the film, Gary, in character as a hitman, explained how he would dispose of a body. So it’s likely he already has a plan on how to dispose of the body. 

Gary Johnson was a real person?

Yeah. You can read the original Texas Monthly article that the movie’s based on. It’s a really fascinating piece and worth reading. The very end is actually the foundation for the film’s main rom com dynamic: