David Fincher's "The Killer" Will Kill One Thing: Your Time
The new Netflix movie lacks vision regarding its subject matter, which is sociopathy
By 2023, we've seen a thousand hit-man movies come and go, and probably half of them use the "job gone wrong" plot. When a new movie takes up that storyline and makes it sparse, it's in serious danger of needlessly repeating anything made before.
What then does "The Killer" add to the filmography of this hitman plot?
Nothing, I'd say.
What then is this movie's purpose? Possibly to celebrate pretty pictures, of which it has scores and scores, thanks to veteran director David Fincher (“Fight Club,” “Se7en,” “Gone Girl”) and his cinematographer.
The plot of “The Killer” is pretty easy to sum up. It’s about a lone assassin (Michael Fassbinder) who’s hired to kill an elite in Paris, only he botches the job. When he quickly returns to his home in the Dominican Republic, his female companion is attacked brutally. He then goes to find out who did this, going to see all of his colleagues, killing them off if they seem to be against him. Will he find who did it to his girl?
That’s all, so the movie watches as if it’s "John Wick" at a tortoise-pace, or maybe a Wick movie as made by Jean-Pierre Mieville.
That seems like a compliment. Let me tell you, though, it is not.
I say that because, among other things, "The Killer" breaks one of the cardinal movie rules: never use a voiceover narrator unless it's additive.
Here? Nope. The voiceover is quite stupid in my view. It ruins a very well-crafted opening 15 minutes, in which Michael Fassbender's robotic assassin character stalks his prey somewhere in beautiful Paris. What could've been an awesome silent-movie sequence is pointlessly dominated by the Fassbender character's incessant mumbles that demonstrate that his mind is a cliche-filled wasteland.
Empty they are of content. He cites stats galore, and he rambles through fifteen minutes of a lengthy rationalization about why he's acting as a paid killer. While doing so, he repeats a thousand cliches, admitting so, one of which is Aleister Crowley's "Do what thou wilt," only he claims to forget who says it.
I don't believe him: he's either a dummy for not remembering that Crowley said that, while recalling all the other smart-guy stats he says, or he's playing with us.
He should be playing with us. Yet this script is not smart enough for him to do so. Therefore, “The Killer” merely depicts a hollow-shell of a character type: the robo-killer of hitman movies of yore. Fassbender even has played a better one in the Alien franchise.
The lead character of this movie turns out, for all his killer suavity, to be just a Mumbly Joe. He screws up a hitjob, then works his way through the videogame of his life, colleague by colleague, getting revenge on the people he knows and whom he apparently works for.
You go to one location, learn info, take somebody out. You go to the next, learn info, take somebody out. Do that five times and you've got this movie.
There’s a speech he repeats several times, whenever he’s going to kill somebody. It goes something like this: “Don’t have empathy. Empathy is weakness, and weakness is vulnerability.”
This to me is more Mumbly-Joe talk. Yes, he's trying to be a sociopathic killer, the heartless human doing a hit job for money. Thus — metaphor alert! — he controls his heart rate by his mental powers, so that he can shoot flawlessly.
Have we not seen this kind of character a thousand times, doing these very things, for the sake of "cool" movies? I didn't need another one that sucked away two hours of my life.
What exactly do we learn from "The Killer" about sociopaths, people without empathy, hitmen, and whatever other general type this movie depicts? Nothing, if you already knew the basics of them, of which Netflix has a hundred thousand psychopath documentaries that will teach you these basics.
This movie has no insightful vision beyond what has already been depicted time out of mind. It is therefore an exercise in Fincherisms — dark-lit, well-filmed shot after dark-lit, well-filmed shot — a movie that proceeds like its main character, remorseless and unempathetic and cool-looking.
Does this movie agree then with its main character that all is nihilism? Because that is basically his stated philosophical view of life.
I don't know. Maybe. Our main character, who is not Mr. Smarty Pants even though he might think of himself that way, repeats all the classic cliches that movies use if they want to signal that some character equals Nihilism personified: "dog eat dog," "kill or be killed," "survival of the fittest," "do the job you were paid to do." The Coens have made fun of this type for decades.
So yes, the movie shows that this unempathetic robo-killer does not really mean what he says when he mumbles, near the beginning, that "I serve no god, no country . . . I . . . don't . . . give . . . a . . . f—k."
We spend the next 90 minutes very slowly watching him give a f—k, at least about his career and the woman that he seems to like. He does care about something, the movie tells us. So maybe there's no such thing as pure nihilism.
Well, duh. That's not an insight, and this movie could’ve said that in an efficient 80 minutes rather than in the agonizing 120 it takes to end this picture.
As well, you can spend your time better by directly learning that, or inferring it, from any Philosophy 101 class. I bet there's a plethora of Youtube videos made by non-philosophers that shows that Person X, claiming not to care, actually does care about something, which at the least is "not caring." As the cliche goes, actions speak louder than words, and if you act in some direction, you care about that direction. Why doesn't Mumbly Joe know that?
So Fincher has proved that his Mumbly-Joe Robo-Killer character does care. I guess that’s a “gotcha!” to all the dumb nihilist assassins out there!
And yet, the main character speaks non-stop as if some dumb AI program wrote his voiceover monologues.
Please, someone, get rid of the entire voiceover narrator. Clean this movie out with your laptop’s video-editor, and replace his words with silence. I'll bump this movie up at least a star.
"The Killer" is probably best watched as an exercise in cool shots containing a wandering solo man doing hit jobs in a noir setting. Nothing new to see here.
How many Fincher movies are going to do this before he calls it quits? Given his filmography — chock full of killers looking cool in motorcycle helmets driving through noir cityscapes — it may be at least half of them, or more.
In the end, the exercise in making this kind of movie over and over again may be as pointless as anything. There’s your nihilism.