It Must Be Exhausting Always Rooting For The Anti-Hero

My Thoughts On The Killer

Back in 1990, Clint Eastwood elected to make a film inspired by the events that led up to the production of one of the all-time Hollywood classics, John Huston’s The African Queen. Although the resulting movie, White Hunter, Black Heart was an undeniably intriguing work featuring one of Eastwood’s most offbeat performances, he clearly must have realized at some point that, even with his star power, it would most likely be at best a marginal commercial prospect. Therefore, as soon as he was done with that one, he quickly churned out another film that fell more in line with what audiences expected from him, the cop thriller The Rookie. However, it was clear from watching it that his heart just was not into doing yet another film of this type—outside of one decent stunt sequence involving a car jumping off of an upper floor of an exploding building and the singularly weird conceit of casting Raul Julia and Sonia Braga as evil Germans, it was so blandly formulaic and lacking in genuine inspiration that even unabashed fanboy Richard Schickel could barely bring himself to even mention it in his Eastwood hagiography. The punchline, of course, is that this guaranteed hit proved to be such a flop that it had prognosticators suggesting that the star’s long career was coming to an end. (Of course, his very next film was Unforgiven, which goes to show how good prognosticators are at their jobs.)

The Rookie is not a movie that I dwell upon very much—I barely even recall seeing the damn thing—but I found it coming to my mind while watching The Killer, the latest film from David Fincher. Fincher’s previous film, you will recall, was Mank, another film that was inspired by the events that led up to the production of one of the all-time Hollywood classics, Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, and another film that more or less disappeared from our collective consciousness about a week or so after it debuted on Netflix. As a result, The Killer seems like an overt attempt on Fincher’s part to repay the streaming service for indulging him in that more personal project with something more along the lines of what comes to mind when one thinks of a Fincher film—a slick thriller filled with flashy visuals, dark humor, brutal violence and even a screenplay by Andrew Kevin Walker, the writer of his big breakthrough Seven. While the end result is reasonably entertaining and certainly better than The Rookie, there is also the sense that Fincher is just going through the motions this time around by making the kind of film that he could churn out in his sleep instead of doing something new and challenging.

Based on the graphic novel by Alexis Nolent & Luc Jacamon, the film stars Michael Fassbender as an unnamed hired killer who, for an exorbitant price, will indeed eliminate someone deemed worthy of such an end. In the extended Paris-set opening sequence, we observe him waiting at length for his latest target to arrive at the lavish hotel across the street from the abandoned office space where he has set things up to take him out. While waiting, he goes into a long and elaborate voice-over monologue in which he explains the ins and outs of making it as a hired killer, stressing the strict professionalism that he brings to each aspect of the job and avowing that it is not the kind of work that most people are equipped to pull off. In his mind, he is not so much a person as a super-efficient killing machine and one that likes to remind you of just how special and rarefied he is whenever he gets a chance.

Finally, the moment of truth comes and the killer inexplicably whiffs it, killing the wrong person and letting the intended target get away and become presumably unreachable. This is not good for business, of course, and so he hightails it out of Paris back to his elaborate spread in the Dominican Republic in order to figure out his next move and how to make things right with his presumably none-too-pleased unknown employers. When he arrives, he learns that he was beaten there by a couple of thugs who beat and tortured his girlfriend (Sophie Charlotte) to death in an effort to find out his whereabouts. Now that he has a target on his back, the killer decides to turn the tables by tracking down and murdering everyone responsible for the attack, from the cab driver who took the thugs to his house to the law professor (Charles Parnell) in New Orleans who got him into the business and arranged everything to the thugs themselves (Sala Baker and Tilda Swinton) to the mysterious client (Arliss Howard) who put all of the events into motion in the first place.

As the killer goes from locale to locale, he continues to ruminate on his vast experience and cunning that allows him to be so good at what he does, ranging from the seemingly endless array of hideouts in which he has stashed money, guns, and fake identities (the latter of which will no doubt amuse older-skewing members of the audience) to the ingenious methods that he employs to getting rid of the bodies that need to vanish forever. He also demonstrates the myriad ways in which such seemingly innocent corporate entities like Amazon, Postmates and FedEx can be employed to help him in his bloody work. The joke of it all is that, based on the evidence seen here, is that while he certainly talks a good game, our anti-hero may not actually be that good at his job—like the Coyote from the old Road Runner cartoons, he makes a lot of mistakes along the way and only barely survives a number of his encounters.

As I said before, all of this is certainly watchable on some basic level—the visuals from Erik Messerschmidt are certainly arresting, the action sequences (especially the extended brawl between the killer and the roid-raging brute who attacked his girlfriend) are executed with maximum skill and professionalism and there are a number of very funny moments of pitch-black comedy sprinkled throughout, including the revelation of the previous tenant of the space where the killer waits in Paris and his invocation of the notion WWJWBD?—What Would John Wilkes Booth Do? Fincher keeps things humming along at a nice pace and there are good performances from Fassbender and Swinton, the latter turning up for a single restaurant-set scene that is arguably the high point of the entire production. My guess is that for most people going in with certain expectations about what one might expect from a David Fincher project about a hit man, this film will meet them.

And yet, while watching The Killer, the overwhelming sense that I got from it was a sense of detachment—not from the killer regarding the sordid things that he does in exchange for large paychecks but from Fincher himself regarding the sordid things that he is doing here in exchange for a presumably equal amount of renumeration. Despite the slick efficiency on display at every point, all I got was the sense of a guy simply going through the motions—even his largely pointless version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo had more of a sense of genuine personal investment than he displays here. Too often, it feels less like a film by him and more like the work of someone who is trying to make something deliberately evoking the Fincher oeuvre and trademarks.

This one gets all the surface details right but, unlike Fincher’s best films, it never probes deeper—instead of trying to unsettle or challenge viewers, he is merely content to give them a politely grisly good time that is “edgy” without being too disturbing. For example, one odd element of the narrative is the fact that for all of his professed proficiency, the killer only seems able to successfully murder people who are either women or non-Caucasian men—when his targets are successful white men, as he sees himself to be, he never quite manages to pull off the job. This is clearly a choice on the part of Fincher and Walker and you keep waiting for it to build to some kind of payoff but it never does—it just becomes another potentially provocative idea that gets put to the side in the service of a story that feels emptier and emptier as it builds to its meh conclusion. Likewise, the nihilistic narration supplied by the killer throughout is funny at first but becomes a bit tedious at a certain point. There are times when the character feels like someone who grew up watching Fight Club without ever getting the point of that film and now wants to implant those misunderstood lessons to us.

The Killer has its moments of glory and it is certainly never boring to watch. If you are in the mood for a film that follows a vaguely defined man as he goes around shooting people in the head for two hours, you probably aren’t going to find a better-made example of such a narrative anytime soon. However, as someone who values David Fincher as one of the best filmmakers working today, watching him winding his way through this fairly mundane material is akin to watching a revered musician merely playing scales for a couple of hours—it proves that he can handle the fundamentals of suspense filmmaking as good as anyone else working today but it leaves you yearning to see him giving himself a challenge. Now that he has paid off his metaphorical Mank debt, here is hoping that his next project will allow him to do just that.