The Killer review: David Fincher shoots to thrill
Too bad, then, that the ambitious director is off target, even with solid work from Michael Fassbender as the titular assassin
Film Reviews David Fincher
To call The Killer, director David Fincher’s new thriller, aloof and cold to the touch is an understatement, despite the presence of near-constant voiceover narration from star Michael Fassbender as a seasoned assassin. And even if that detachment is part of the point, it doesn’t well serve this efficient but strangely disposable effort.
Adapted from a French comic book series by Alexis “Matz” Nolent and Luc Jacamon, the film hums with Fincher’s usual sense of well-honed articulation, in which each cinematic piece is polished, and highly intentional. But it also exists in a firmly low-altitude orbit, never achieving a level of significant differentiation, thematically or narratively, that would stake a grander claim to its reason for being beyond mere plug-and-play entertainment.
Fassbender stars as a nameless contract killer, a man who works for no God or flag, as he informs viewers. He lives his professional life with a premium value placed on blending in—eschewing anything that might draw attention to himself, despite storage units stocked full of identity-changing paraphernalia in multiple cities. The film opens with a Parisian assignment which, despite careful planning, goes sideways. After the consequences of this screw-up are visited upon his girlfriend Magdala (Sophie Charlotte), the title character gets to work in tunnel-visioned fashion, visiting his handler Hodges (Charles Parnell) to obtain information he needs to attempt to extract revenge. For this assassin, that means tracing his way up a chain of particular-set-of-skills functionaries (Sala Baker, Tilda Swinton), all the way to the rich client (Arliss Howard) whose botched hit first made him a loose end.
The Killer re-teams Fincher with Seven screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker, and it marks a seeming return to the type of dark thrillers on which he first cut his teeth to great success. Much like Fincher’s previous films, The Killer is meticulous in its assemblage. Kirk Baxter’s editing is assured, and the movie hums and throbs with a knotty energy that in its best moments abets its protagonist’s steely determination. Fincher augments Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor’s atonal score and some disconcerting urban sound design work from Ren Klyce with a roster of songs from The Smiths, which are featured as his assassin’s soundtrack of choice.
This technical mastery establishes and assures a baseline absorption in terms of a viewing experience. Whatever one thinks of his films, collectively and individually, it’s difficult to argue against the assertion that Fincher marries form and content in a highly thoughtful and usually compelling way. And his precision, his exacting sense of captured movement, here fits hand-in-glove with a character whose entire being is dictated by thoroughness. The film’s tagline, “Execution is everything,” delivers the obvious pun, but then works on another level for rib-nudging cineastes.
But pedigree and well-calibrated diligence only go so far. In the cold light of day, the question looms: what scenes stick to the ribs of a viewer? The answer, unfortunately, is not many. As The Killer moves through its nearly two-hour runtime, the vapor-high of a tightly choreographed opening sequence and the undeniable pleasure of being comfortably cradled in the hands of a master craftsman give way to a wandering mind.
A physical confrontation with Baker’s character, credited only as “The Brute,” provides some hand-to-hand action, though perhaps nothing viewers haven’t seen before from Jason Bourne. Later, Fassbender’s scene with Swinton lands in curiously muted fashion. These individuals, one comes to realize, are all empty shells. The movie is a non-character study.
It’s not fair, of course, to stack up every film against the full canon of its maker. But there certainly doesn’t feel much of heft or substance here. This is especially surprising given how long Fincher has talked about making The Killer—well over a decade. For all that dedication, his movie doesn’t land as a tongue-in-cheek allegory about the detail-oriented grind of filmmaking (“If you can’t handle boredom, this job isn’t for you”), which would be a deliciously bold take on such a paint-by-numbers narrative.
Nor does it particularly connect as a deeply personal portrait of alienation, or an unpacking of late-life realizations regarding the same. There’s no big catharsis here, nor a meaningful awakening. The willfully soporific voiceover—in which Fassbender’s character insists that luck, karma, and justice don’t exist, and repeats other mantras meant to achieve and assist focus—eventually has a numbing effect. Fassbender, who can dim the light in his eyes in a way that communicates emotional disconnection without hollowness, is as solid a match for this role as one might hope. He makes it work on a surface level. But it’s the material which ultimately squeezes the life out of The Killer.
Despite its slick artifice and elaborate world-building, the John Wick franchise offers up a more realistically believable character than what an audience gets here. The Killer successfully aligns viewers with its form; its most memorable moments lie in its textures, its austere settings, its well-ordered frames. That the film doesn’t stir anything in the subconscious, though, is its greatest surprise.
The Killer opens in theaters October 27 and will be available on Netflix November 10
31 Comments
I was hoping the voiceover in the trailer just made the movie sound boring, given who’s involved. Oh well.
Different strokes and all, but I thoroughly enjoyed this film, though I was in a very sleep-deprived and wound up state while watching it–which very much matched the main character’s tone during this film. I don’t know that it was supposed to be all that exciting, and Fassbender’s monologue/voiceover made it far more interesting to me—though to be fair I’d probably enjoy listening to him reading the phonebook (man is that a dated phrase or what—what would be a modern equivalent though? Perhaps “reading the wikipedia entry on phone books”?)
Michael Fassbender playing an assassin? Gee, where have I seen this before, hmmm…
Are his feet crossed at the ankle?
Wow his AC movie is 7 years old…
The review makes this movie sound a lot like Haywire, only told from Fassbender’s perspective and less fun.
Not for much, I suppose, but one of my favorite movie assassins is Jude Law’s Maguire from Road to Perdition. He isn’t as fussy but he’s got such a perverse back story that you have to be somewhat impressed.
Fucking GREAT movie (and comic). So good.
The minute I heard the first bars of the score I said “That’s Thomas Newman.” The movie is a near perfect American tragedy.
Honestly, Fassbender has one of the widest spectrums of quality in his career of any of the current a-list actors
Is he A list? Hes forgettable to me.
He’s front and centre at awards shows and I imagine he commands sizeable 7-figure sums for turning up on a project and that to me is what I would deem A-List. I don’t think A-List necessarily means great actor.That said, while I actually do think he has turned in some great performances even if you don’t like the fella, the contrast is plain to see between the quality of the likes of Shame, Inglourious Basterds and Hunger to the lack-of-quality of the likes of The Snowman and Assassins Creed.
Brother gotta get paid.
Oh for sureThe “Michael Caine” school of: No, I haven’t seen Jaws 3 but I’ve seen the house it paid for
I think in some cases being forgettable makes an actor better. When I see Christopher Walken do something I am never fooled into thinking I am watching a character instead of watching Walken play one. Fassbender doesn’t have any tics or tell tale signs it’s him doing the thing. Some people might call it boring, but in reality that’s what most people are.
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spoiler alert lol
The Killer: such a generic, easily forgettable title. Why do movie companies purposely choose such awful, nondescriptive titles?
I hate it too. I assume studios are hoping that it will pop up on streaming when you’re searching for something else and you’ll just go “eh good enough”.
So they were going to use that headline for this review no matter what, right? A- or a D-, they couldn’t resist that tired play on words.
Just saw this at a screening and honestly this review might even be being a little generous. Fincher can put together a visually interesting scene in his sleep, and honestly it seems like maybe that was in fact what he was doing here? Great soundtrack, stacked cast, but all in the service of… what exactly? “John Wick but with no emotional stakes?” “Jason Bourne but he’s an emotionless cypher?” “James Bond but really boring?” I spent most of the movie unsure if the woman who’s honor he was avenging was supposed to be his girlfriend or just his housecleaner who he really was fond of.Fassbender’s interminable monologues made it initially seem like there was supposed to be some sort of American Psycho-like point about how all of these people are actually incredibly dull and vapid on the inside, but even that didn’t go anywhere.Fincher’s worst movie, and I’m including the theatrical cut of Alien^3.
“Fassbender’s interminable monologues made it initially seem like there was supposed to be some sort of American Psycho-like point”Yes! You got it. You shouldn’t take what he says at face-value any more than you would Ed Norton in fight club.The character is an unreliable narrator who spells out the rules that he continues to break. He’s Christian Bale who believes he’s the best but has, in reality, just been lucky.There are so many clues here that he’s not a very good assassin.He sneaks into a house to kill someone but doesn’t notice he tripped the door alarm. He gives sitcom aliases that any detective raised near a tv in the 80s would put together in a few minutes. He’s a fuckup who wants to be the smooth, exacting, yoga-mastering killer we want him to be (and he tells us he is) and he just barely manages to make it through the movie.If you embrace it as dark, dark comedy that’s a spoof of Bourne’s “always one step ahead” character, you’ll see that the insipid voice-over talking about Storage Wars is just another Fincher goofball who thinks he’s the cool kid.
Are you sure you watched the same movie? He coasts through everything without any effort or issues, including getting nearly beaten to death by someone more bigger and stronger than him, but he walks away from that fight with just a few minor but visible bruises and scratches, and somehow manages to not raise any suspicions when he rents cars, checks into flights, as he breezes through customs with those “sitcom aliases” you mention that seem to work without a hitch.
This felt like I was watching Hitman or some other kind of stealth video game than a movie, let alone a dark comedy. I’m not sure what’s funny about him snapping the neck of a woman he told he’d let her live. Or that he pretty much gets away with everything.
He’s a hitman, he shouldn’t be getting in to fistfights. He has all of these rules that he constantly breaks. He isn’t very good at it.And he never told the woman he would let her live. She knew that. She just didn’t want to disappear because then her kids wouldn’t get the insurance. He snapped her neck and pushed her down the stairs making it look like an accident. She knew she was going to die. She didn’t take the pills in the bathroom because 1) Suicide would invalidate her insurance payout and 2) She knew her body would never be found. Are you sure you watched the movie?
Dark comedy doesn’t need to be ha-ha funny. Ever see American Psycho? That was dark comedy, satire.
Not only did you not follow along with the film, you don’t even seem to be following along with what I said or even David Fincher who has said in interviews that this is a thriller, not a dark comedy that you oddly seem to think it is. I didn’t say anything about him not killing her, but that maybe aside from him listening to music and his monologue in the very beginning, there is no real satire this film. It’s just a simple and a very bad and contrived action/revenge flick for the reasons the op and even the AVClub mention, hence the low grade it got, that you are reading way too much into.
Fair enough – I misunderstood when you said “I’m not sure what’s funny about him snapping the neck of a woman he told he’d let her live” to mean that he had promised that he would let her live.
Maybe I’m reading too much into it – fine. Fincher said that it was a thriller? Cool. Death of the author and all that.
If, however, you go into this film with an oppositional reading of it – that it’s about a bad hitman (who has gotten lucky) with an intentionally insipid inner monologue (the kind a bad killer who thinks he’s narrating a movie about a great hitman would deliver) you’ll have a much better time. And there are so many different things that make this guy a bad killer from the start. My favorite is the part with the lawyer where he delivers the American Psycho -like:“Three, nine-inch-nails (GET IT? groan), middle-aged non-smoker, about a hundred-eighty pounds. Should last six, seven minutes [guy dies]. . . shit”
That’s dark comedy.
To your point, all of it could be explained by bad writing. From that angle it’s an episodic mess of a revenge thriller with a protagonist who needs to shut the fuck up.
Personally, I think David Fincher is kind of a shit director who peaked with Zodiac (Manhunter, from the one episode I watched, felt like it was written by a 23 year-old in a community college screenwriting class), which leads me to believe you’re correct. It also makes my experience with this all the more hilarious and I would recommend anyone who goes into this film to view it with that interpretation in mind. They’ll have a better time.
Yes, but it is bad writing and plotting, and that’s the op’s point. That this movie throws in bits like that like you mention, but then does nothing with it. He doesn’t really monologue or screw up much afterward. Most of the movie, the tone is more Bond/Wick/Taken and not American Psycho or any kind of satire, no matter which way you interpret it and that’s it’s problem.
You are right that Fincher peaked decades ago and this film shows it. He’s still good at cinematography and style, but he’s lost it at everything else.
This is a great description and pretty much how I took it. I laughed very hard at several parts I’m reasonably sure were meant to be funny (the internal monologue getting cut off by real world violence combined with the look on Fassbender’s face of surprise that anyone would dare interrupt struck me as gleefully funny the several times it happened). He was terrible at being a killer, and terrible at obeying even the rules he sets down—which is likely how he saw himself. His monologue kept me riveted through the entire movie as well. Also, Tilda Swinton was fucking brilliant as always in her 10 minutes of screen time.
I dunno. I’d like to believe this was the intention, but (and I guess we’re getting into spoiler territory here but I can’t imagine too many people are still checking this thread) very little in the movie other than throwaway details comes off as critique? He’s surely not as suave as he thinks he is, but everyone who crosses him dies, the police are a nonissue, Tilda Swinton’s character takes him completely seriously (and if there was going to be a moment where someone rubbed his nose in the disparity between his self-image and the ever-spreading mess around him, that was gonna be it), and he ends the movie in a state that both he and the audience recognize as victorious. I’ve also seen people make the claim that it’s all a metaphor for the business of being a film director; I’m not sure I buy that either.
After re-watching it, I was struck by a few details. First, the opening credits show all of these clever ways a hitman might dispose of someone. He alludes to these in his final scene. And yet, we never see him do anything remotely as clever or “accidental” – he kills everyone up close and messily. Maybe that’s the point (it’s personal!) – but he mentions more than once that he isn’t “exceptional” or “a perfectionist.” You would, of course, miss that if you weren’t looking for it since his droning narration becomes numbing after awhile.
I read some of the graphic novel and he isn’t like that at all. The character in the book is a guy who fucks up and pays for it – but isn’t incompetent.
In the film he survives on luck. He wouldn’t, for example, have won the brawl in the house if not for the guy impaling himself on the leg of the table and severing his artery.
Watched this Saturday night and yeah, not much going on there.