Hit Man follows Gary, an ordinary man who pretends to be a hit man in sting operations but becomes involved in crimes and lies when he ends up falling for a client. The film is now streaming on Netflix.
Warning: This article contains heavy spoilers
Plot summary
Gary Johnson, a professor of philosophy and psychology at the University of New Orleans, is a simple man living an ordinary life.
Apart from teaching, Gary also works part-time with the police. He plays the tech support role in their sting operations, aimed at catching those who try to hire hit men.
Whenever the police are informed that someone is looking for a hit man, they send one of their own as a hit man to meet and trap the person.
When Jasper, the officer who usually assumes fake identities to meet the clients, is suspended for beating up teenagers, Gary is asked to step in at the last minute.
Gary plays the part of a hit man incredibly well, much to everyone’s surprise. As a result, the police ask him to continue meeting the clients from then onward.
Gary researches every client before meeting them, adopts a disguise accordingly, gains the client’s trust, and provides the evidence that the police need to arrest them.
Gary’s success rate is so high that even when Jasper returns, the police decide to let Gary meet the clients, whereas Jasper is asked to support the team behind the scenes.
One day, Gary meets a client named Madison while pretending to be a contract killer named Ron. Madison is married to a controlling man and wants Gary to kill her husband.
As Gary gets along with Madison in their first meeting and she does not seem like a killer to him, he advises her to use the money she is offering him to start a new life for herself.
Instead of collecting evidence against her, Gary gives her life advice and lets her go. Soon after, Madison invites him to a dog charity event.
Gary meets Madison again as Ron, the hit man. Madison tells him that she took his advice and divorced her husband instead of hiring someone to kill him.
The two of them continue meeting and start sleeping together, with the condition that Madison will not ask Gary about his personal life.
Madison still believes that Gary is Ron, and Gary continues to pretend to be Ron because Ron is a much more exciting man compared to the plain Gary.
Gary and Madison then run into Madison’s husband, Ray. Madison and Ray are not officially divorced yet, as Madison had told Gary; they are still in the middle of the process.
When Ray manhandles Madison, Gary pulls out a gun, which Madison bought and learned to shoot from Gary, on him.
Not long after, Gary is sent undercover to get evidence against a client, none other than Ray, who is trying to hire a contract killer to have Madison and her new boyfriend murdered.
When Ray sees Gary, he flees, causing the undercover operation to fail. Jasper is the only one who suspects that Ray fled for a reason.
The night Gary and Madison ran into Ray, they also ran into Jasper, which is why he suspects Gary of being the boyfriend Ray wants to have murdered.
Gary lies to Jasper. He tells him that he had coincidentally met Madison that night and that she was only thanking him for his previous advice, but Jasper does not believe him.
Ending expalined:
The end of Ron’s story
Gary’s fake life gets complicated when he finds out that Ray has been killed. Madison leads the police to believe that it was a drug deal gone wrong.
However, they also suspect Madison’s new boyfriend, who threatened to shoot Ray, unaware that the boyfriend is actually Gary.
Jasper suspects that Gary has been dating Madison and might have been involved in the murder. His suspicions scare Gary.
When Gary goes to question Madison about the murder, she confesses to him that she was the one who killed Ray, believing that Gary murders people all the time.
It is then that Gary reveals to her that he is a fake hit man and that Ron is a character he created. In reality, he helps the police catch people who hire hit men to commit murders.
Gary still has no intention of turning Madison in, but after finding out that Gary has been lying to her this whole time, she asks him to leave.
Proving Madison’s innocence
The police start suspecting Madison of having a hand in her husband’s murder when they find out that she is the sole beneficiary of Ray’s life insurance policy worth a million dollars.
Jasper asks Gary, in front of the team, whether he has had any contact with Madison after she first met him to get her husband killed, knowing full well that he did.
Gary tells the team that he ran into her once and she thanked him for his advice—the same lie he had told Jasper.
Jasper then suggests putting a wire on Gary and sending him to Madison’s house to question her as Ron in order to find out whether she killed Ray or not.
Gary goes to Madison’s house. He takes advantage of the fact that his team can only listen to their conversation and not see them.
He types messages on his phone to let Madison know that their conversation is being recorded and instructs her on what to say.
He successfully leads his team to believe that he has only met Madison once after their initial meeting and that she is innocent.
The final obstacle
Jasper still does not believe that Madison is innocent or that she has not been dating Gary, so he goes to her house and waits for Gary to visit her.
As he had expected, Gary comes to meet her, and Jasper catches them red-handed. He can now prove that Gary is Madison’s boyfriend.
Additionally, he has enough evidence to convict Madison of murder and Gary as her accomplice. Jasper reveals that he has been following Gary and Madison because he wanted his job back.
Jasper blackmails the two of them for money that Madison will get from the insurance policy, but while stating his demands, he passes out.
It turns out that Madison drugged Jasper. To save Madison, Gary ties a plastic bag over Jasper’s head to suffocate him.
Gary plans to stage his murder as a suicide, aware that Jasper is a liability to the police, so no one would be looking too much into his death.
Gary and Madison then confess their love for each other. A few years later, they are seen living happily with their two children, which means they got away with Jasper’s murder.
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