Does Glen Powell’s Gary Johnson get his happy ending in Hit Man?
After stealing hearts alongside Sydney Sweeney in the sleeper hit romantic comedy Anyone But You, Glen Powell’s newest film is finally available on Netflix. Powell and director Richard Linklater received a lot of buzz back in 2023 for their newest collaboration, Hit Man, which Netflix spent a lot of money on and has been holding for a summer release. On Friday morning, the slightly true story of professor-turned-undercover agent Gary Johnson made its way to the streaming service and movie fans are already tuning in to see how Johnson’s larger-than-life story plays out. WARNING: This article contains major spoilers for Hit Man! Continue reading at your own risk…
Hit Man is based on an article about a real man who worked part-time for the police, posing as a killer for hire in order to catch folks who were looking to pay for murder. In the film, things spiral out of control for Gary (Powell) when he meets a woman named Maddy (Adria Arjona), who wants to have her abusive husband killed. Posing as a suave and sexy hit man named Ron, Gary convinces her not to go through with it, to save her from going to jail. She follows his advice and leaves her husband, only to start a relationship with Ron (who’s really Gary but he can’t tell her that).
This all results in the eventual murder of Maddy’s husband, leaving her and Ron as the main suspects. After pretending to be Ron for so long, however, Gary ends up blending in with his fictional alter ego and works with Maddy to solve all their problems.
An abrasive police officer named Jasper (Austin Amelio) is onto Gary and his relationship with Maddy. Things get worse when Gary learns that Maddy actually did kill her husband. After learning Ron is actually Gary, though, Maddy breaks up with him, but he returns to save her from being arrested and the two end up plotting their next move. Jasper tries to strong arm Maddy and Gary into giving him the money that Maddy was set to inherit from her dead husband, but he doesn’t notice Maddy poisoned his beer while the three of them are alone in her apartment. When it’s unclear whether or not she gave him too much, Gary fully embraces his inner Ron and does the deed himself, covering Jasper’s head with a plastic bag and watching him suffocate.
There’s a line earlier in Hit Man where Gary’s ex-wife tells him that everyone is messed up in their own way, and it’s important to find someone whose crazy is compatible with your own. Somehow, that’s exactly what Gary and Maddy find in one another. Yes, he lied to her about his identity the entire time they were falling in love, pretending to be someone completely different. And yes, she killed her husband. Then they murdered a dirty cop together. It turns out, they make a pretty great team.
Gary ultimately finds a way to change himself, taking some lessons learned from Ron and applying them to his own personality. The final scene shows a version of Gary that he’s always wanted to become, married to Maddy with a couple of kids, working a normal, steady job. Neither one of them remained killers after the Jasper incident, but they don’t seem to have any regrets about it either.
