One of the first – of many – great things you notice about David Fincher’s The Killer is just how good it is to have Michael Fassbender back on the big screen. It’s been four years since he was last in a movie, and six years since he was last in a good one, but he slots right back into his unique place as one of his generation’s most compellingly frightening leading men playing a morality-free international assassin with an unquietable internal monologue. It’s a protagonist that perfectly suits the sensibilities of both the actor and his director, who is clearly having a ball in his comfort zone of ruthless professionals and cold analyses of humanity’s worst behaviours.
Based on the graphic novel by Alexis Nolent, we’re introduced to the titular Killer (who goes by many, many, many aliases but never gives us a real name) as he waits on the top floor of a shabbily disused Parisian office building with a sniper rifle, waiting days on end for a high-profile target to show up in the penthouse suite across the road. Here, through pretty constant narration, he describes to us the ins and outs of the assassination job market, rattling off the skills one needs as well as admitting to just how boring it can be, all while finding comfort in a seemingly endless The Smiths playlist.
It’s a funny and gripping voiceover, one that stays with us throughout, very well-written and part of a riotously entertaining lead performance by Fassbender. The Killer claims to be emotion- and opinion-free, but we see this façade slowly crumble as more and more chaos is introduced into his life after his shot hits the wrong target in Paris. From there, he has to flee back to his hideout in the Dominican Republic, where he discovers that his girlfriend has been badly injured by a punitive squad sent by his employer (an enjoyably mean performance from Charles Parnell) after his failure, switching the mission from survival to revenge.
It’s a classic and pretty simple story, structured neatly between six chapters and an epilogue in a manner keenly reminiscent of the recent Hitman videogame trilogy. Every chapter is a new location, and in every new location lies a new target as the Killer works his way up the chain to put a bullet in the head of everyone involved in the attack on his home. Fincher, himself of course no stranger to meticulous planning, delights in the fine details of the Killer’s work, whether that’s the sharp shocks of violence involved in the kills themselves or just him working out the best tools to buy on Amazon Prime to help get the job done.
In this latter focus, Fincher and writer Andrew Kevin Walker manage to say something about the dehumanising nature of digital bureaucracy and gig work and how well these atomised systems lend themselves to contract killing, but The Killer is not a political treatise. This is a blackly funny thriller first and foremost and it really is a hell of a lot of fun, from a bone-breaking brawl with a giant hitman known as The Brute to a terse last supper shared with an enigmatic old pro assassin played by Tilda Swinton in a brief but riveting appearance.
As lensed by DOP Erik Messerschmidt, the visuals are as bleakly precise as you would expect from any Fincher project, all sickly yellows and urban murk, while the pulsating score and punishing soundscape work in perfect harmony to immerse you in the Killer’s head. While it’s true that Fincher can hardly be said to be challenging himself with The Killer, sometimes all you need for a really great time at the movies is a seasoned veteran reminding you exactly what it is he does best.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 