Die for you: Why contract killers on screen hit just the right spot

With Richard Linklater’s action-comedy ‘Hitman’ coming to cinemas later this year, Geoffrey Macnab looks back at contract killers in film, and questions why they are rarely shown as villains

Charlize Theron in ‘Atomic Blonde’ in 2017 (J Prime/Focus Features/Kobal/Shutterstock)

In Mr & Mrs Smith (2005), Angelina Jolie’s Jane, dressed in a dominatrix outfit, casually breaks a naked man’s neck. Across town, her husband (Brad Pitt) is simultaneously whipping out his pistol and shooting a table full of poker players dead. Early on during French crime picture Le Samouraï (1967), the imperturbable Alain Delon‘s Jef Costello walks into an office hidden at the back of a nightclub, guns down the owner and walks briskly out again, crossing a restaurant floor as a jazz band plays behind him. Meanwhile, in the thriller Collateral (2004), Tom Cruise’s Vincent is in the back of a taxi making small talk with the driver (Jamie Foxx). He gets out at a motel and moments later a corpse lands on top of the vehicle; it’s his “first kill” of the night. These are just some of the countless examples of charismatic, good-looking stars performing contract killings on screen.

There is something about hired assassins that fascinates filmmakers. They’re rarely shown as villains. Whether in exploitation pictures, art house films, comedies or blood-soaked Quentin Tarantino thrillers, these grim reapers are more frequently shown as loners on some strange existential quest – or as professionals doing their jobs to the utmost of their ability. The same movie fans who are repelled by serial killers like Ed Gein and Ted Bundy on screen are often intrigued by these glamorous freelance executioners who go about their business in such a daring and relentless fashion.

What remains surprising is the uncritical and romanticised way in which hired killers in movies are still portrayed on screen – and the indulgent way in which audiences lap up their misdeeds. In his new comedy-action film Hitman, Richard Linklater promises to expose the hypocrisy of the killer-for-hire genre. These films trade in fantasy figures and steadfastly refuse to acknowledge the violence and venality of their protagonists.

The movie tells the story of Gary Johnson, played by Top Gun: Maverick star Glen Powell. Gary is the most sought-after professional killer in Houston. If you want to rub out a cheating spouse or hurry an abusive boss into an early grave, he’s the man you’re going to call. The twist here is that Gary is actually an undercover cop.

Hitman is based on a true story written by Skip Hollandsworth in the October 2001 issue of Texas Monthly. Over the years, the real-life Johnson, who enjoyed gardening and classical music, was recruited to kill more than 60 people by clients he later arrested. In one interview, Johnson likened his professional life, posing as a contract killer, to “something right out of a cheap novel, badly written”. His theory as to why he received so many requests from seemingly law-abiding citizens to snuff out their relatives, partners or work rivals is that they were “looking for the quick fix, which has become the American way. Today people can pay to get their televisions fixed and their garbage picked up, so why can’t they pay me, a hit man, to fix their lives?”

Hollandsworth’s morbidly funny story hints at how accustomed the public has become to the thoroughly perverse idea put out in so many films that contract killers are actually sympathetic and decent types who just happen to have unusual jobs. Johnson tells his neighbours that he works in “human resources”. His clients trust him implicitly because he is “like something out of a movie”. They regard him as a professional providing a service and don’t ever quite think through the awfulness of what they’ve actually asked him to do – until they discover his real identity.

Johnson seems as meticulous as Edward Fox’s assassin in Fred Zinnemann’s The Day of the Jackal (1973) who is depicted as a master craftsman. As he prepares to assassinate President De Gaulle, we see Fox fussing around with the components of his new sniper’s rifle, fretting that it is made of stainless steel when he asked for aluminium. As the actor acknowledged in a 2011 interview at the Riverside Studios in London, there would have been no point in making the movie if viewers had been repelled by the “Jackal”.

Fox perfectly summed up the paradox about a genre that treats killers as heroes: “You’ve got to make a totally immoral man, totally greedy, ruthless, a brutal man, you’ve got to make him likeable otherwise audiences won’t want to go and watch the film.”

You’ll often see the assassin off duty in his or her apartment, maybe drinking too much. Think of Charlize Theron in David Leitch’s Atomic Blonde (2017), slugging vodka in an ice bath and nursing her bruises, or John Travolta and Samuel L Jackson between deadly assignments having their famous discussion about burgers and French fries in Pulp Fiction (1994). Such scenes endear the killers to audiences. They make them seem human, vulnerable and funny.

Theron is playing an MI6 spy in Atomic Blonde and so her character is on the “right” side, with license to kill all those double-crossing colleagues and enemy agents. Leitch, a former stunt double for Pitt, had also produced John Wick (2014) in which Keanu Reeves’s hitman hero also has ample justification for massacring scores of his Russian-American mobster enemies. After all, they murdered his pet dog.

Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt in ‘Mr and Mrs Smith’ in 2005 (Moviestore/Shutterstock)

When Reeves’s John Wick strikes, audiences never stop to think that his victim is some mother’s son or daughter. There is no discussion of the grief or trauma that might be caused by the person’s death. The violence is intricately choreographed. Wick dances around like Gene Kelly in an old MGM musical, shooting some of his enemies and strangling, stabbing or twisting others’ necks as if they’re bottle tops. He shows little grief or remorse. Nonetheless, audiences’ sympathies remain entirely with him.

It’s intriguing to compare Wick with the contract killer Jef Costello played by Delon in French director Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï (1967). Delon is cool, impassive. He wears a Fedora and a mackintosh that makes him look like a private eye in an old Hollywood crime thriller, but he is a distinctively French figure, driving around Paris in his stolen Citroen DS.

He shows no emotion whatsoever when he is shooting someone or when he is shot himself. He is endlessly resourceful but also has a fatalistic quality, as if he already knows that his days are numbered and that he will soon be hunted down himself. You can’t help but ask yourself why such a stylish man lives in such a threadbare apartment. “There is no solitude greater than a samourai’s, unless perhaps it be that of a tiger in a jungle” reads the opening quote with which Melville underlines the film’s poetic intentions. This isn’t so much a conventional crime thriller as an elegiac, jazz-filled meditation on loneliness and loss.

In Doug Liman’s romp Mr and Mrs Smith, Jolie and Pitt play contract killers working for rival agencies and married to one another. Five or six years into their life together, they are bored rigid by their suburban existence and already in marriage counselling. Neither realises the other’s profession. A few plot twists into an already very contrived movie and they are assigned to kill each other. Liman plays up the contrast between their stultifying domestic routine and their violent profession. There are uncomfortable moments here when the characters suddenly start murdering people. One moment they are bickering middle-class spouses. The next, they’ve turned into angels of death who seemingly find killing as easy as breathing.

Life at such moments becomes very cheap indeed. Jolie claimed in a 2001 interview that there was a period she felt so suicidal as a young woman that she planned to “hire somebody to kill me”. In several films, characters have done just that. French New Wave star Jean-Pierre Léaud starred as the woebegone protagonist Henri Boulanger in Aki Kaurismäki’s London-set I Hired a Contract Killer (1990). This is a very deadpan comedy-drama in which the hero, just laid off from his dreary office job, pays an assassin to kill him but then falls in love and tries forlornly to cancel the contract.

John Travolta and Samuel L Jackson in ‘Pulp Fiction’ in 1994 (Miramax/Buena Vista/Kobal/Shutterstock)

One of the best hitman movies is Don Siegel’s The Killers (1964), very loosely adapted from an Ernest Hemingway story. Originally made for TV but regarded as too violent to be broadcast, it stars Lee Marvin as Charlie Strom, a grizzled and brutal old killer. Right at the start of the film, Charlie and his henchman Lee (Clu Gulager) shoot hotshot racing driver Johnny North (John Cassavetes). This is one of the few hitman movies in which the killer actually notices the expression on his victim’s face; Johnny just stands there, as if he wants to be killed. Much of the rest of the film unfolds in flashback as Strom discovers why Johnny welcomed being shot.

“You see the only man not afraid to die is the man that is dead already,” he tells the woman (Angie Dickinson) who betrayed Johnny and broke his heart. An added attraction is the casting of future US president Ronald Reagan as the amoral villain, Jack Browning, a ruthless killer himself.

In his 1994 feature Leon, French director Luc Besson introduces a Charlie Chaplin-like sentimentality to the world of hard-boiled assassins. The professional killer Jean Reno, in trademark dark glasses, becomes a surrogate dad to the precocious, foul-mouthed, 12-year-old girl Mathilda (Natalie Portman) who lives in the same apartment block. Her gangster father has just been killed by Gary Oldman’s corrupt gun-toting cop and Reno teaches her the secrets of his trade.

Besson’s earlier assassin movie Nikita (1990) is sharper and less maudlin. Its protagonist, played with feral intensity by Anne Parillaud, is a former street punk and drug addict turned by a secret government agency into a highly accomplished killer. In both films, Besson relishes the contrast between everyday drudgery and the adrenalin-filled world of the assassins.

Hitman movies are often surprisingly soft-centred. In John Woo’s The Killer (1989), Chow Yun-fat plays the doomed but very debonair gunman who accidentally blinds a beautiful singer during a nightclub shoot-out. He subsequently watches over her as if he is her guardian angel, taking on a final job to pay for the operation that may restore her sight. Alongside the mayhem and bloodshed of Woo’s trademark action scenes are moments of extreme melodrama. Chow’s character is more of a romantic hero than a cold-blooded killer.

A far bleaker view of hitmen is given in the Coen brothers’ adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men (2007) in which the psychopathic, lank-haired killer Chigurh (Javier Bardem) is so relentless in his work that he seems like the embodiment of pure evil. He looks innocent enough and yet is ready to kill anyone who crosses his path.

Keanu Reeves in ‘John Wick’ in 2014 (David Lee/Thunder Road/Lionsgate/Mjw/Summit/Kobal/Shutterstock)

Assassins in movies are often described as if they are blue-collar workers. They’re “mechanics” (Charles Bronson in Michael Winner’s 1972 film The Mechanic), “cleaners” (Reno in Leon) or they “paint houses” (Robert De Niro in The Irishman (2019). Such euphemistic language doesn’t disguise their business. They murder people for a living.

Audiences have seen so many movies about solitary contract killers that they could be forgiven for thinking that such characters really exist and that you could probably find them in the phone book if you looked hard enough. In fact, as Hollandsworth discovered when writing his Texas Monthly article about the cop who posed as a hitman, “No one is really certain if there is someone in this country [the US] who makes a living as a hired gun”. There are plenty of homicidal criminals and “sicarios” working for mobsters and Mexican drug syndicates who kill to order but you’ll be hard-pressed to find real-life equivalents to lone wolves like Wick, Delon in Le Samouraï or Reno in Besson’s movies.

This, then, is a profession largely invented by the movies. Solitary killers have become staples of screen storytelling everywhere from Hollywood to Hong Kong. They never lack for clients. Their business seems recession-proof. They continue to be portrayed in absurdly idealised fashion but scrape away their surface gloss and you’ll see them for the dysfunctional two-bit psychopaths they really are.

Richard Linklater’s ‘The Hitman’ is expected to be released next year