I enjoyed David Fincher’s thriller about a deadly perfectionist for what it is, a stylish, sleek, superbly directed and acted procedural that doesn’t have a lot going on beneath the surface… and that’s ok.
I’m glad I went into this movie with somewhat lowered expectations after watching a bunch of reviews that summed up The Killer as a B-movie with A-list talent. I admit I had hoped for more from a positively mouth-watering combo of David Fincher and Michael Fassbender, but if nothing else the film is a perfect vehicle for Fassbender’s strengths as an actor and it’s a pleasure to see him back in a leading role.
Though the nameless hitman speaks sparingly throughout the film, we’re privy to his internal monologues, starting from the film’s terrific opening sequence. The biggest challenge of the profession, he says while sitting in a rented space in Paris waiting for his mark to show up, is boredom. The Killer has many more thoughts on the amorality of the world and how all of his actions are a mere drop in the bucket, and what one must do in order to succeed in his world. Stick to the plan. Forbid empathy. Listen to The Smiths a lot (not an official rule but it might as well be, since Morrissey’s mournful crooning rarely leaves his earphones).
But despite the appearance of being fully in control, our cool, calm and collected assassin bungles the job in a manner so clumsy I found it stretching credulity. This means that some ruthless, wealthy people are now after him, and so he races back to the Dominican Republic to find his girlfriend barely clinging to life. The Killer has enough money in foreign accounts to disappear and never be seen again, but instead he decides to go on a cold-blooded revenge quest. The irony of acting on emotion while reciting his usual mantras about forbidding empathy seems entirely lost on him.
And that’s pretty much the rest of this slow-burn thriller, as The Killer hunts down his targets in a precise, methodical fashion. There are no major plot twists, no meaningful character growth or development, no deeper themes that I could discern. There are multiple plane trips, fake passports, meticulously planned break-ins and clean-ups, a ferocious and visceral close quarters fight to the death, and a scene-stealing appearance from Tilda Swinton who manages to create an intriguing character in a space of a few minutes.
The movie’s refusal to soften its protagonist even a little bit is almost weirdly admirable; his relationship with a person he cares about gets a bare minimum and his way of ‘softening’ is to grant one of his victims a wish for a quick and unsuspicious death. It of course helps immensely to have a leading man as magnetic, charismatic and watchable as Fassbender, whose onscreen intensity and physical presence remains undimmed and who can give a compelling performance while barely moving a facial muscle. The Killer is also often darkly funny, in a subtle and dry kind of way.
It’s easy to see why a notorious perfectionist like Fincher would be attracted to a story about a control freak who is equally obsessive and detail-oriented, which in a way allows him to poke fun at himself. On a technical level The Killer is as pitch-perfect and finely tuned as Fincher’s best work, I’d just hope that next time around he works with a script that’s a tad more ambitious than a basic revenge tale we’ve seen many times before.
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