David Fincher’s 12th and most recent feature film, The Killer, may not be the culmination of his career as a major Hollywood film director—depending on your personal preference, that distinction would be better assigned to Zodiac or The Social Network—but the film is a summation of, and a self-reflexive comment on, his oeuvre and reputation. Fincher is a well-known perfectionist whose multiple takes of a single scene mirror the exacting details of Stanley Kubrick. He is a director obsessed with flawlessness, and with The Killer, Fincher’s created a near-perfect thriller about the moment when the need for utmost precision goes disastrously awry. If this were Fincher’s final film, its meta-narrative of obsessive control would offer a fitting farewell for a director who, after the career-altering experience of wrestling with producers over his vision for Alien 3, has since held tight to the reins of all his work.
The Killer is based on a French graphic novel series of the same name written by Alexis “Matz” Nolent and illustrated by Luc Jacamon. It originally began publication in 1998 and is still going strong to this day. The film project first entered Fincher’s radar in 2007 when it was in the early stages of development by Paramount Pictures and Brad Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment. Fincher approached screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker—a frequent collaborator going back to the script for Se7en—to work on the film. For various reasons, the project never coalesced at the time, with Fincher shifting his focus to adaptations of other titles such as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Gone Girl—not to mention two original series for Netflix, House of Cards and Mindhunter. But Fincher always kept The Killer filed away, a full-fledged vision of the film already formed in his head with exacting detail.
Following the release of Mank in 2020, Fincher returned to the project. Fourteen years after it was first pitched to him, Walker was now fully onboard with production beginning in 2021 for Netflix. The idea was always to turn The Killer into a lean, Soderbergh-ian thriller, in contrast to the sprawling runtimes of Zodiac, Dragon Tattoo and Gone Girl. Coming in at just under two hours, The Killer is indeed more akin to Fincher’s earliest, tightest works such as Alien 3 and Panic Room. Unlike those latter films, though, Fincher is at the top of his game here, wringing the most from a shorter runtime with an elegance and ease that approaches the balletic. The Killer is a marvel example of paring a film down to the purest of elements: muscle, bone, sinew.
The Killer is about a monumental fuck-up and the subsequent, furious dash to correct the dire consequences of said fuck-up. That’s about it. Its comic book source material can be seen alluded to in its six-chapter format, as each of these sections could easily be illustrated in the 20-ish pages of a typical floppy found on a spinner rack. We begin with our unnamed, title assassin—a taciturn and ropy Michael Fassbender—scoping his current prey through the window of an abandoned WeWork location in Paris. While he waits to pull the trigger, he intones, in voice over, his credo—“Stick to the plan,” “Anticipate don’t improvise,” “Forbid empathy,” etc.—that he goes on to subsequently violate throughout the rest of the picture. He also does some yoga, eats an Egg McMuffin sans the muffin (keto!) and listens to the Smiths (of course). When his seemingly high-powered target finally enters the luxury hotel opposite our assassin’s WeWork, the killer misses and shoots what seems to be a dominatrix, instead. The audience is immediately clued in that this guy talks a bigger game than he delivers. To any objective observer, this appears to be an amateurish mistake. And a grievous one.
The remainder of the film is all about cleanup. The killer first travels to his hideout in the Dominican Republic where he finds that his home has been invaded. His lady love has barely survived a domestic, retaliatory attack and is hospitalized in the ICU, now making our assassin just as motivated by vengeance as he is with self-preservation. And so, he goes on an odyssey of sorts, traveling to New Orleans to kill his handler, “The Lawyer” (the always excellent Charles Parnell) and a secretary named Dolores (Kerry O’Malley). Then it’s on to St. Petersburg, Florida to take care of “The Brute” (Sala Baker, who portrayed Sauron in the Lord of the Rings trilogy). Then to Beacon, a tiny hamlet due north of New York City, to dispose of “The Expert”, played by the inimitable Tilda Swinton. And finally, to Chicago, to make amends with “The Client” (Arliss Howard), a billionaire who wears Sub Pop merch while taking work calls at his home.
Unlike Mank, Social Network and Benjamin Button, The Killer wasn’t Oscar bait for Fincher, instead getting totally ignored by the Academy, in spite of it being his most aerodynamic and accomplished picture since Gone Girl, period. There are deep stratifications and multiple layers to The Killer’s seeming simplicity. It takes a lot of work to make a convoluted somersault appear so effortless.
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