The Killer review – Brutal, cold and oddly simple, but is it good?

Director: David Fincher

Writers: Andrew Kevin Walker, Alexis Nolent, Luc Jacamon

Stars: Michael Fassbender, Tilda Swinton, Charles Parnell, Arliss Howard, Kerry O'Malley

Running Time: 1h 58m

Please note there may be spoilers below.

I’ve heard that Fincher splits his work into two categories, movies and films. Se7en (1995) is a movie, an audience pleasing thriller with conventional crime table-setting. Not low-brow exactly, but greasy and gruesome in its traditional mystery scares. But The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) is a ‘film’, because thematically it’s a serious, unconventional, head-scratching experience full of thinly veiled philosophizing on the nature of life and death. After the brainy drama of 2020’s Mank, which is safe to say a ‘film’ in this dichotomy, Fincher seems ready again to balance the equation and make a commercially viable ‘movie’ with The Killer, an oddly conventional revenge thriller with a coldly captivating lead from the ever flexible Michael Fassbender.

And it seems Fincher can’t wait to get started. What should ordinarily be a stylish, Saul Bass inspired title sequence to set the scene, The Killer rushes through the opening title-cards at top speed, desperately impatient to get started. So fast, in fact, it’s jarring and unusual to see such impatience with Fincher. He’s spoken before of his love of Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), and this love hasn’t never been more obvious than in his 25-minute opening scene that reverses the Rear Window conceit – here our hero is the one with the murder weapon, hoping to land the perfect kill to the building across the way. Like Hitchcock, Fincher revels in giving us the pleasure of voyeurism, the ‘just what the hell do people get up to’ curiosity is satiated as we watch an established, rich man enjoy the company of a dominatrix. All of this snooping satisfies some base pleasure in us as viewers, just the same way the killer of the title is satisfied by his ability to meditate himself into total concentration.

Fincher’s predilection for nihilistic characters returns here. Our lead, known only as ‘the killer,’ indulges us in copious voice-over to establish his philosophy of justification: “The worldwide population is approximately 7.8 billion. Every second 1.8 people die...Nothing I’ve ever done will make any dent in these metrics.” It’s the same sociopathic exoneration Michael Mann and so many other action filmmakers have allowed their characters to express. You’ve seen this character many times before. He’s Leon The Professional. He’s Seon-u from A Bittersweet Life (2005). He’s Vincent from Collateral (2004). The cliches are all here, even down to the fact The Killer is a sociopath with a slight heart of gold.

The Killer listens to The Smiths, and so do we. The Killer narrates extensively on the nihilistic instincts of humans, as he watches their lives pass by him on the streets of Paris below. It’s all so close to falling into a Joker-esque hole of outsider toxicity. And yet Se7en scriptwriter Andrew Kevin Walker thankfully injects some sneaky humour into the proceedings. The Killer dresses like a German tourist because ‘people avoid them like street mimes.’ He eats at McDonalds because they serve 46 million people each week. He shops for gadgets at Amazon and drinks coffee from Starbucks. There’s something so conscious about tethering The Killer to homogeneous, soulless conglomerates, it soon becomes a reflection of the homogeneous, soulless mindset it takes to be a hitman.

And yet in many ways this film is about the failure of trying to be a soulless person, because for all the ‘empathy is weakness’ pontification going on, The Killer of the title is painfully human. He misses his kill-shot and murders an innocent woman. His humanity pokes through when we notice the names on his ID documents are the names of sitcom stars like Sam Malone (Cheers) and Felix Unger and Oscar Maddison (The Odd Couple). He is emotionally compromised upon seeing his girlfriend Magdala (Sophie Charlotte) laying in a hospital bed, his seething anger telling us that what follows will be a common revenge fantasy.

So far, it’s still a little cliché. Which brings me to something important – this movie could have been made by a thousand other directors. On paper, the script is a slight step above the typical Liam Neeson dad-power fantasy. There are entire scenes from this movie that, again on paper, play the trope of revenge catharsis. The Killer’s emotional journey is about as complicated as Taken (2008), but the execution of each could not be further apart. The Killer is what happens when you give David Fincher approximately $100 million dollars to make a B-grade action movie, and the result is an elevated experience of a hackneyed story. The smooth, softly lit scenes of perfect pans and dollys following the detailed procedure of murder are brutal and unsettling in the hands of a director as meticulous as Fincher. What should be typical becomes ruthlessly atypical because few filmmakers treat a screenplay this ordinary with such seriousness.

A major part of elevating this material is down to Fassbender, who is such a physical performer, his very body fitting the profile of Fincher’s vision. To draw a comparison, whether you’re thinking of Liam Neeson in the Taken series or Denzel Washington in The Equalizer series, each of these male revenge fantasies need you to suspend a lot of disbelief when you begin to critique the ages and physical profiles of those involved. But in The Killer, Fassbender bends and moves with the efficiency needed to convince you. His sinewy, thin frame glides through each frame whilst his weathered face shows the stress of a man trying to keep his psyche together. You don’t need to work hard to suppress your disbelief when the reality you’re being sold is, again, portrayed this seriously.

So much of the joy in Fincher’s work is that he wants you to have high expectations. So much modern film-making is expecting you to give it some slack, but Fincher is the opposite – he wants to meet the high expectations you have, even with the story as basic as a hitman hunting some unlikable characters. He manages even to provide an anti-climatic ending that subverts the ultra-violence of a John Wick movie and shows us mercy, almost like he’s engaging a sudden distaste for the type of material he’s producing. It’s proof he’s aware the joy in watching in The Killer is not so much in the story as the execution.