Released: 10th November
Seen: 15th November
David Fincher is arguably one of the greatest directors working today, a man who has made several of the greatest films of the modern era who people revere as a director for good reason. Even when his films aren’t instant classics there’s something interesting going on with them, at bare minimum, his films will give you something to think about and will probably be full of great performances on top of it. His name alone is basically a marker of quality so it should come as no shock that once again Fincher has made a fascinating film about a dark immoral character and asked us to take a closer look at how mundane they actually are and once again it’s strangely fascinating.
The Killer follows an assassin who doesn’t really get given a name beyond what is obviously a joke fake name so we will call him the killer (Michael Fassbender) because that’s what Wikipedia calls him and the forced repetition of the title will be good for the SEO of this place. ANYWAY, the killer has a very simple job to do which is to assassinate a high-profile target who will be in a specific hotel room at an unspecified time. After killing a couple of hours waiting for his target, the killer finally gets the chance to complete his job… and fucks it up, badly. Although he escapes, the killer finds that his partner was attacked in retaliation for his failure and so his new mission is to find the people who attacked his partner and kill them instead.
Do you remember that running gag throughout A Fish Called Wanda where Ken kept trying to kill this little old lady but ended up accidentally killing her dogs? The Killer is basically what’d happen if you took that subplot and told it dead seriously from Ken’s POV, his meticulous planning explained in laborious detail while seeing every element of the mission carefully laid out. Every moment with the killer is treated like he’s the greatest assassin of all time, like everything he does is so well thought out that no one could ever escape from him and he will get the job done and then it almost always goes wrong and we watch as this character tries to make the best of his constant abject failure.
The Killer is dark comedy hidden under tons of action and thriller, the intrigue of seeing if the killer is going to find who did it is so intense and captivating that you somehow manage to not cackle when he screws up an interrogation so badly that it leads to him not getting the info he needed because someone died about 10 minutes before they were supposed to. It’s a comedy where you can tell it’s funny but you are so interested you can actually forget to laugh at the outrageousness of it all, it’s rare to feel like that’s a positive but this film makes it work, you’re so invested in everything that it becomes funny on reflection of what actually transpired which is a hard thing to pull off (if that was the intent… if not it’s just a nice bonus)
What makes everything so completely captivating is the lead performance by Fassbender who turns the killer into this silent menace who just seems to be constantly on top of things (even when he’s objectively not). When he’s monologuing about how he prepares for a job it’s impossible not to be enthralled by it, the quiet confidence and intensity of it all just oozes from every single inch of the screen. You get why people would hire this man and, once you catch on to the larger joke, why he’s still considered the best while also being a bumbling oaf. It’s the kind of performance that is so perfectly calibrated that you buy everything he’s selling, you buy that this killer has somehow developed a reputation of being the best despite the repeated evidence that he is anything but good at his job.
It should probably go without saying because it’s a Fincher film but The Killer is also just stunning to look at. It’s dark and dramatic but nothing is washed out or hard to see, it’s just a crisp beautiful film with a lot of carefully planned out shots that make it easy to follow everything going on. It’s a simple plot that’s made easier to follow thanks to how well everything is laid out, every time there’s a big fight scene you know where all the players are, there’s no big surprises or anything left to chance, this is a meticulously planned out film… AKA it’s a Fincher film.
The Killer does pretty much what one expects David Fincher to do and does it well, it takes a character the audience should never empathise with and makes them the focus so you can see things from their POV. It’s fascinating to witness someone so confident doing something so horrible but doing it just well enough to seem like a legend. It might not be up there with Fincher’s best, Fincher at his best is better than almost anyone else working today, but this is still some really good Fincher that will undoubtedly have a whole bunch of film nerds very happy… and hopefully won’t have anyone think they should want to be just like the killer.
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