The Killer Review
The Killer is a joyously vicious, amoral, and hugely entertaining thriller that could only be made by a true cinematic master like director David Fincher. Reuniting with screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker for the first time since Seven (unless you count his uncredited rewrites on films like The Game and Fight Club), Fincher transforms The Killer into a work of pop art; a familiar story of bloodshed and revenge that draws inspiration from all over the world. It's chilly, scuzzy, and filled with thoughtfulness and coal dark humour. Although it is not Fincher's best work, some may consider The Killer to be a return to form. In any case, it's one of the director's most enjoyable works to date.
Michael Fassbender plays a committed, nameless, and hyper-focused assassin on what appears to be a mundane, typical assassination job in Paris. After conditioning his mind and body for days, contemplating to the viewer via voiceover that he doesn't believe in things like karma or justice, listening to The Smiths to lower his pulse rate, and going on McDonald's runs for cheap protein, it's finally time to take his big shot. Things go wrong, and his boss (Charles Parnell) reads him the riot act, but he's ready to move on with his life. When he returns to his home in the Dominican Republic, he discovers that the love of his life has been brutalized in an attempt to send him a and an intricate revenge scheme is set into action.
The Killer, based on Metz's (Alex Nolent's) graphic novel and illustrated by Luc Jacamon, has a "stop me if you've heard this before" concept. The concept of a professional murderer seeking vengeance has been done to death, even if there are plenty of filmmakers eager to take such a tired, often formulaic subject to new creative heights. However, Fincher and Walker are determined to make The Killer more than the sum of its parts, creating something that nearly parodies the action movie sub-genre while investigating what makes these vengeance stories so psychologically rewarding.
Much of The Killer is told through gritty, over-the-top tough guy utterances and hardboiled interior thoughts, indicating that it is not a work intended to be taken seriously on a narrative level. The main character's morals - a strong man who says he believes in nothing but finds himself deeply caring about the one thing that keeps him grounded - is overly cliched. Fincher knows he could make this type of action thriller in his sleep, so he focuses his careful attention on the subtextual themes that abound in Walker's screenplay, resulting in the filmmaker's most hilarious work since Fight Club.
The Killer, like Fight Club, feels like a commentary on modern society and business gone wild. We're all just a few steps away from being a ruthless assassin capable of suppressing empathy and compassion in a culture where everything is available at the snap of one's fingertips if they have the means and savvy to get it. Every day, Fassbender's assassin faces a succession of options - to murder or not to kill, to leave or not to leave - and his choices are based solely on instinct and feeling. He may have a job to do, but no matter how much planning he does, every choice is made on the spur of the moment.
And, in his line of business, hasty decisions are a given, and his ability to deal with them head on makes him a sought-after professional. However, he is severely penalized by his bosses for a tiny blunder that appears to be somewhat typical. According to the character, this killer is not a genius, but rather a skilled professional. But in his society, genius is expected, and anything less is considered a personal offense, even by those who continuously insist that their reaction is not personal. "It's just business."
Fincher, who has never done boring visual work in his life, delivers another visual spectacle. Working once more with cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt (Mank, Mindhunter) and editor Kirk Baxter (whose previous collaborations with Fincher date back to The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), the filmmaker brings forth a worldly palette that emanates coldness and dread. Fincher and his crew achieve a level of visual poetry rarely seen in genre movie, whether they are frantically chasing the killer through a perilous, near-miss situation or softly doting on the aftermath of his acts.
There isn't a lot of action in The Killer, which is more akin to 1970s Italian and French crime thrillers, but whenever there has to be a pursuit, shootout, or brawl, Fincher is more than ready to indulge and relish in the harsh stuff.
The film's ending is bound to divide viewers, but it serves an important purpose: it forces the viewer to evaluate the psychology and morality of everything that happened before it. Fincher has done his bit to entertain, and now they want the audience to piece together the decisions made along the way and decipher what they all signify. It's a film that's so viscerally enjoyable and wickedly delightful that you almost don't notice how well it works on numerous levels.
The Killer is the kind of sophisticated genre movie that nearly no longer exists. While it may appear at first look that Fincher has taken a step back, The Killer is far from that. It's exactly the type of film that made him such a phenomenon behind the camera in the first place.