Directed by David Fincher. Written by Andrew Kevin Walker
There’s a man sitting in an abandoned WeWork in Paris who considers himself a master of the universe. His job is to kill people for money, and he believes he’s got it down to a science, repeating his self-imposed rules like mantras: Stick to your plan. Trust no one. Forbid empathy. Anticipate, don’t improvise. Never yield an advantage. If followed, it all comes together like a piece of IKEA furniture called Mhürdar.
We watch him prepare for his next hit in the opening 15 minutes of David Fincher’s The Killer, listening to Michael Fassbender’s dry monotone listing all the minutiae of his work and the philosophical musings that enable it. No room for doubt. If the rigidity of your methods leave no room for error, there won’t be any, seems to be the conclusion. Until there is. A bungled assassination suddenly sees the sights turned on the hunter, and a race begins for the Killer to vindicate himself before someone snuffs out his light.
The Killer is a B-movie with A-movie production quality and direction. The story is a flat line from A to B that never deepens or redirects, and it’s an action-driven sprint that doesn’t let up for a minute. Fincher’s in full control of this locomotive, with The Killer appearing as straightforward genre work that’s honed to a fine edge, and his exacting direction is a perfect match for Walker’s script. If there ever was a movie that could gloss over its creative shortcomings with stellar handiwork, this might be it. It doesn’t quite get there, though.
Style over substance needn’t be a death sentence, but The Killer is also not true to its simple ethos. The killer’s a killer because according to himself, he doesn’t give a fuck, yet the entire movie’s predicated on him actually giving much of a fuck, going back on the offensive after someone close to him is caught in the fallout of his fuck-up. Worse yet, they can’t even make this person worth fighting for, as I’ve seen crash test dummies with more personality and background.
It’s perhaps The Killer that doesn’t give a fuck, gliding along sleekly on the tracks laid down by Fincher, but completely void of anything worth considering or investing yourself into. It’s as much a compelling story as a car dealership is a home.
Instead, The Killer presents us with a protagonist who joins American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman as a character who despite their morally contemptible behavior (sadly) will have admirers. People who have Excel sheets for hearts, who like to provoke, and have gone unloved for too long. The Killer contextualizes murder as not so bad since millions die every second, so what’s one more? He thinks “goodness” is make-believe. He thinks his actions are negligible in the grand scheme of things, because he’s just one person. Yet, he also has the arrogance of someone who believes he sees past life’s veil of unknowing to the cogwork behind it and he’s just a product of those gears. He’s a victim too, you see, so don’t tut-tut his murderin’.
Fincher does try to clown him and his control freak supremacy by showing him its limits every other scene, but he never gets far enough to sneak back up on his protagonist. You’re stuck with this solipsistic dunce for the full ride, listening to his incessant voiceover, inescapable and delivered like he’s trying to persuade you. Enjoy the tedium of a person who believes domination is the only mode of interaction.
Fincher’s oeuvre is filled with misanthropes whose actions and beliefs shape the movies they appear in. They’re arrogant monsters who use the movie’s runtime to deliver their own particular manifesto, espousing crazed religious zealotry, wronged womanhood, and misogyny. The monologuing is inevitable, Fincher loves hearing them out, and when there’s some thought put into those viewpoints, it works.
Not in The Killer. Here, we’re taken inside the mind of a teenage boy who’s fumbling his way through moralist philosophy, the Joe Rogan Experience, and Grailed fashion tips. The result is as expected: vapid, trite, and void of sentiment.
Mikkel Frederiksen 