Latest film from director David Fincher, The Killer is about a contracted hitman simply known as “The Killer” (Michael Fassbender) who fails an assassination attempt and is now on the run. After his wife gets severely injured due to his error, he must track down whoever was responsible and kill them.
The movie is as simple as it gets for a Fincher film. There’s not a lot in the film that’s more complex or intricate than what I surmised in the very first paragraph. The real meat on the bone is our protagonist played excellently by Michael Fassbender. Fassbender takes the role of a psychopathic murderer who seems to be uninterested about the world. He will monologue excessively about how everyone is a cog in the machine or that what he does is inconsequential to the world around him. Why does it matter if he kills a few people today if hundreds of people die every day? His nihilistic viewpoint makes him a standout to most movies about a hardened killer looking out for revenge. Fassbender is also great as he’s not exactly a very emotive character. A lot of his performance is just from his eyes and how he looks with such contempt for most people in the film. He never blinks, never yells, yet you would never want to be in a room with him. Fassbender rarely disappoints with his acting abilities and this film is no exception.
But what makes it even more interesting is the contradictions within himself as a character. He claims that he is a professional and that everything he does is with precision, yet he consistently makes mistakes throughout the film. He accidently kills a prostitute, messes up a murder scene, and almost dies in a fight because he simply was not watching his surroundings. He criticizes how people are simply being a slave to “the system” and that he’s the exception even though he heavily relies on that said system in order to achieve his goals. He even flip flops with his own nihilism since the whole plot is about him going after the people who put his wife in the hospital yet rambles about how nobody really matters in the grand scheme of things. It reveals the actual truth about his character which is that he’s not that great of a hitman and, as much as he wants to protest, it like the rest of us.
The film does a good job deconstructing the fantasies of what an actual assassin does. Where other films like John Wick fetishizes the experience of being a professional assassin, Fincher explores the other side of the curtain which is the reconnaissance. A lot of the runtime of the film is just Michael Fassbender silently watching other people and studying their movements before finally pouncing on them. You forget that these guys waste days to simply observe their subjects before taking the best approach of executing them. It is not exactly entertaining to watch, but it’s at least doing something differently than a lot of movies do in this genre which is just going in a room and killing whoever’s in there.
It is disappointing that such an interesting character is bogged down by an otherwise uninteresting film. David Fincher seemed more focused on making some sort of philosophical discussion on how easy people can exploit the system in our society than exploring the topic in any meaningful way. The story is way too simple for whatever themes Fincher was going for and the characters (aside from the Killer) were not engaging enough for you to care. Sure, the film is great on a technical level and the fight scene in the middle was fun, but you don’t really care about what was happening in the plot or to anybody in the film. Themes can be important for a
film, but it also has to blend with the story as well because the actual story of a film is the thing most people are going to remember.
The Killer is one of Fincher’s weakest films and is easily the most plain one in the story department. It has an interesting main character, and the film is beautifully directed. Unfortunately, these aspects do not make the sums of it parts as the film is uninterestingly slow and filled with wasted screen time of characters that you do not care about. As precise as David Fincher is as a filmmaker, this is one of the rare times where he does miss his mark. 2.5/5
