Where Texas Monthly's Hit Man ends, Richard Linklater's Hit Man begins
the true crime that's worth your time
The crime
Murder for hire. Almost.
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The story
It feels like we started hearing about Hit Man ages ago, with critics at film festivals speaking well of it when it played at TIFF and elsewhere. Enough time had gone by that I actually had to do some quick research to remind myself whether Richard Linklater's latest had enough of an IRL basis to qualify it for review around here. It does – Skip Hollandsworth profiled the real Gary Johnson, who passed in 2022, in an October 2001 piece for Texas Monthly – but re-reading the Hollandsworth, I wondered whether Linklater could pull off an adaptation that uses the original reporting as more of a jumping-off point than a blueprint.
