After a fateful near-miss, an assassin (Michael Fassbender) battles his employers in the latest from Se7en, Fight Club and Gone Girl director David Fincher. The Killer grips despite the familiar beats, writes Stephen A Russell.
The Killer (2023)
“I am human and I need to be loved, just like everybody else does.”
So sings Morrisey in The Smiths song How Soon Is Now? It plays on earphones as Michael Fassbender’s many-named-and-none assassin prepares to take a kill shot by lowering his heart rate to 65 BPM, thus ensuring his gloved trigger pull is controlled enough to prevent the vintage glass of a palatial Parisian apartment from diverting his bullet from its target.
We learn as much via his mordantly droll interior monologue, as he stakes out the building opposite, from an abandoned WeWork outpost across la rue, perched in front of a buzzing red space heater and bemoaning the boredom of his job. Too often the sign of lazy plotting, this narration (and regular catch-ups throughout the film, mostly set to Morrissey) works as a means to step inside the chilly mind of a man like this.
What would it take to coolly kill a stranger for money?
The requirement to stick to a meticulous plan, never improvise and under no circumstances show empathy for your victim or their situation. Human? Not so much.
It’s a neat little juxtaposition deployed by Se7en, Fight Club and Gone Girl director David Fincher in his latest stylishly heightened dealing in the business of death. If the basics—the job goes wrong, he suffers the consequences with a blow to the heart and strikes out for vengeance—are as familiar as The Smiths, then it’s Fincher’s gift that he manages to make The Killer feel as fresh as it does while wholesale photocopying the plot of countless stone-cold thrillers.
Fassbender, marking a welcome return after a four-year time-out, of course, is key. A remarkable presence, he’s able to grip our attention, often single-handedly. There’s a delicious contradiction, too, in his description of how to disappear into the background while wearing a Hawaiian shirt, dazzling white leisure wear plus those steely eyes and glass-cutting cheekbones accentuated by a fresh shave popping out from under a similarly glaring bucket hat. He couldn’t stand out any more on the cobblestoned streets of Paris if he tried.
At least his chameleon game lifts a bit when his Bond/Bourne/Wick-like globe-hopping eventually leads him to the US, though his bin man looks are still suspect. But first, there’s a pit stop in his luxurious beachside home in the Dominican Republic and the horror of a bloody crime scene. It’s a real shame how desultorily Sophie Charlotte is treated in the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it hospital sequence that serves as nothing more than the killer’s pivot point, but such is too often the way of these stories. Oddly, the film elicits more grim sympathy for the plight of a poor taxi driver in the wrong time and place than our hired gun’s partner.
At least the ever-ice-cool Tilda Swinton gets to steal the limelight as a fellow traveller in a whisky-quaffing restaurant showdown, as does Why Women Kill’s Kerry O’Malley, underlining the collateral brutality of a job like this as the book-keeping secretary to Mission: Impossible star Charles Parnell’s lawyer-cum-assassin’s creed boss. Elsewhere, Kiwi actor Sala Baker slaps in a fierce Floridian throwdown that marks the film’s bone-crunching peak—bonus points for not doing the Wick dirty on a dog.
Se7en scribe Andrew Kevin Walker adapted the screenplay from the graphic novel by French writer Matz—aka Alexis Nolent—as illustrated by Luc Jacamon. While it may not offer anything new, Fincher’s flicks are always a real good time, harnessing the energy of his music video days crafting clips for the likes of Madonna and George Michael. He ensures a crisp focus on character, place and pace, ably assisted by cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt’s keen eye, Ren Klyce’s and eardrum-popping sound design to die for and snappy editing from Kirk Baxter. Nine Inch Nails buddies Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross also deliver those BPMs with a palpitation-inducing score.
All of which counters the known and lends The Killer the kicks it needs to kill it on the big screen (see it there if you can over streaming on Netflix first). Somebody better get a contract on Fassbender quick smart, because his presence has been sorely missed, a bit like that Parisian target.
