'The Killer' briefing

2 ½ (out of 4)

            David Fincher has maybe frittered about so long with TV that something dispensable, episodic and shortchanged has sneaked its way into his movies — Mank was his late father’s Oscar bait/handed-down-homework special and now he’s back to the usual programming: adult thrillers with blood and shadows and some necessary brooding.

And it’s because Fincher was always so good at mainstream supply and demand as well as uncompromising skill in seedy exploitation that it makes The Killer seem perhaps lesser than it is. Whether he had Jeff Cronenweth or anyone else (this time DoP Erik Messerschmidt returning after Mank), the trademark look remains, operating within only a third of the color wheel, and as always it’s so cool to soak it in when the editing is as tight as it is here — slap a now signature Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross score of bleepbloops on top and you have what the non-normies refer to as KINO. All that assured style could make up for whatever novel David decided to adapt right?

Almost. The Killer has got to be a satisfying read but its peripheral qualities in an audiovisual domain are tougher to extract, and the primarily streaming release (there were no local theatrical options for me) is sadder because it’s just about where this sinewy sliver of content belongs. The totality of this taut tale isn’t nearly valuable enough to consider along the lines of Fincher’s much richer, sensationalist paperback punch, his go-to gradient — Seven, Panic Room, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Gone Girl… see there’s cinematic urgency, artistic panache and thematic food for thought in all cases, even the slightest, Panic Room, which seems critically more dismissed and is nonetheless bottled, breathless bliss. The Killer is just some Netflix joint.

Something about it is so hapless, somehow sterile even though we're dealing with such extreme pulp, and pulpy for Fincher means practically all mush and no juice. The Killer strikes more like an obvious book adaptation than even Gone and Dragon Tattoo despite such famous sources — those 2010s gems play out as uncompromising movies whereas this rubbed off like a goddamn Steven Soderbergh movie if I’ve ever seen one, who similarly started dishing out for Netflix about five years ago. Granted, if this was concocted by the prince of digital photography (David is king don't deny), that is before it was the industry standard (much more praiseworthy than what George Lucas, Robert Rodriguez and Lars Von Trier [Michael Mann, debatable] did with the cusp of the crossover from celluloid to pixels just over a decade ago) The Killer would barely be considered one of Steven’s better late-career wins.

In fact, this may as well have been a prequel spin-off about Michael Fassbender’s character from Soderbergh’s Haywire, a much more gripping, piquant assassin anecdote, with a stronger, similarly situated, solitary brawl to boot amidst a restricted exercise of stylization. I love the Fass but find his efforts here almost tragically… wrong. His American accent is an awkward, grating element and the narration itself, while clearly essential to the film’s social commentary and sleazy, self-possessed interiority, is just fucking dimwitted at certain points, perhaps on purpose. Fassbender's performances often border on brilliant but this role is just too robotic for him to work with — he ironically has infinitely more room to spread wings in android-mode for Prometheus (he’s the best part) and Alien: Covenant (he’s the only watchable part).

It’s as if Nicolas Winding Refn ruined Drive with more subjectively and still failed to further edify our nameless protagonist in any way. In a similar backhanded move we have another autistic criminal who is a complete STONE COLD KILLER except when you happen to touch his only emotive nerve and he GOES CRAAAAAZY! "AHHH I’m so incredibly emotional and logical!" Not to mention The Killer lift's Drive's inciting getaway chase and simply swaps four wheels for two. And I mean it if I heard the very basic recitation of the hit man code or mantra or whatever again I was gonna have to get my own piece. The intense, almost incessant mind-monologuing is the most traditional thing about this neo-noir, other than a muddied sense of "what's happening?" in the simple yet labyrinthine story — the sleazy, morbidly ironic gallows humor could’ve been stripped entirely and possibly made for a more appropriately empty movie, as even with a mildly complex character anchored by a phenomenal actor, our man with a gun isn’t interesting enough, nor is the ‘deconstruction’ of the related rules of the genre. Either taken as cool or calculated irony, akin to Fight Club’s cult of disenfranchised men, The Killer is only whelming as entertainment and vexing to enjoy and think about.

Maybe Summer Finn could’ve fixed this Smiths fan and put the assassin simp in his rightful place! The film is best in the first and last of its six segments, all gingerly bookending a gun-for-hire who isn’t terribly good at his job, and somehow Fincher slides by on this dark comic, semi-self-aware sincerity, even though this movie isn’t this secret comedy complete with bumbled protagonist like Redditors are projecting — if this guy’s such a regular fuck-up, a mediocre marksman, it’s a miracle he comes out unscathed in the end eh?

I guess I lament that day when a pivotal modern filmmaker produces something you can so easily skip. Like Matt Reeves’ The Batman, Damien Chazelle’s Babylon, Alex Garland’s Men, Edgar Wright’s Last Night and Soho and so many others of late, I’m just sick of technically flawless movies hanging their scrupulous hats on these ridiculously underdeveloped screenplays. It’s the most perfect style over substance example in some time and while, more often than not, I’m one to say that if said style is certain enough then a little narrative nothingness is forgiven, but not in this case. I don’t care if I’m “living amongst the normies” — this was Fincher’s most inessential movie since Alien 3 and YES that includes Benjamin Button thanks for asking.