MIDNIGHT REVIEWS The Killer
Midnight Reviews features reviews and thought pieces written and edited by a parent, at night, after bedtime.
This afternoon’s movie…
“What next? You get one more thing on TV.”
“Gingerbread man.”
“Are you sure? You’re seen that a lot lately.”
“Gingerbread man, Daddy.”
“What about Bluey? Or Spidey? Spidey has the Hulk too! Or Gruffalo’s Child? Or Jungle Book? You like Baloo, don’t you, what about Baloo?”
(beat)
“Gingerbread man, Daddy.”
Review: You can’t catch him, but it turns out you also can’t escape him.
The evening’s viewing…
THE KILLER
Directed by: David Fincher
Featuring: Michael Fassbender, Tilda Swinton, Charles Parnell, Sala Baker
Synopsis: After a job goes wrong, a contract killer goes on the run. When he gets home and finds evidence of revenge on behalf of his employer, he goes out in search of some payback of his own.
Review: It’s incredibly difficult to go into a movie completely blind. Expectations will be built like walls, using anything from concrete to dry leaves depending on what you already think of a whole host of elements. For David Fincher’s The Killer, the expectations were writ large without even seeing a trailer (fortunately for those who like to avoid not just spoilers but trailers, posters or even a release date, Netflix’s advertising department is apparently being run by one person with a bucket on their head; marketing for any of their movies comes by rarely unless sought out).
Expectation one: David Fincher’s output has on the whole been excellent. Will The Killer live up to this?
Expectation two: this is a movie about a hitman, a hitman movie, if you will. What is going to make it different to all the others?
Expectation three: will there be as much product placement as Gone Girl? (spoiler alert: not quite, but it tries!)
From the opening titles, it’s clear this is a David Fincher joint. So far, so nihilistic. There are no rough edges, only sharp ones. Much has been made of the use of The Smith’s back catalogue as The Killer’s (Fassbender) personal work playlist, but is this Fincher’s choice or The Killer’s? ‘I find music a useful distraction.’ What is Fincher saying here?
Yes, we could say that The Killer reflects Fincher. Everything is done deliberately, but not necessarily with caution. It is all done with purpose. But this would be easy. While The Killer has his mantras, his foibles and his work habits, Fincher attempts to use a gilt-edged sense of irony to cut through some of what could’ve been a dour movie. While it does stop the movie from becoming a boring hodge podge, the irony is less gilt-edged and more spongey. In order to remain undisturbed, he uses a WeWork sight as his base of operations. His voiceover mantra is constantly at odds with the actions he’s actually performing, at one point even being interrupted by a character speaking to him. But at no point does The Killer himself crack a joke or even let loose with a grin. ‘When was my last nice, quiet drowning?’ This is a lonesome if not lonely man who was perhaps born without a sense of irony. In lesser hands, this film would’ve been dime-a-dozen hitman schlock so it is perhaps with a grateful heart that it was directed by David Fincher. But at the same time: why? His previous works have been, in one way or another, much more complex, much more rewarding, and much more conspicuous with what they were trying to say.
Fassbender… gives a performance of such precision
This movie seems to be about control, and what happens when you lose it. About what happens when your routine is taken away by your own mistakes. The tight editing reflects this, with Fassbender appearing in every scene but there never being the sense that we spend too long on his face, lest we get to know The Killer too well. He’s always hiding his face from his targets, so why not us as well?
Sound design and cinematography join in with this sort of thing too, with The Killer embarking on yet another transcontinental flight giving us the chance to experience a shot of clouds under a sickly, pale green hue. He wanders lonely as a sickly cloud, yes, but by his own choice. Sound is used to keep us disjointed, reflecting both The Killer’s home life and his occupation (is there, for the movie hitman, any distinction?) Monotonous, calm, with bursts of jarring noise to keep that heart rate from passing too low below sixty. There is a lovely moment where the soundtrack transitions so neatly from music into the sound of the bing of the airplane seatbelt sign, because even if the story is hardly new Fincher brings a polish to everything he does. Is it supposed to be cool though, or cold? When finding the guns underneath his house, John Wick uses a sledgehammer and a bucket of elbow grease. A David Fincher hitman uses an electronic safe.
the film verges on being as empty as its protagonist
Each sequence of the movie is separated into chapters, slick and minimalist titles telling us where we are and who we’re after. Are we complicit in The Killer’s crimes? Or is his voiceover merely him wanting someone to talk to? People and their preoccupations, however, seem to annoy him and before long it’s with understanding that we see him get annoyed at someone saying ‘Oh God, oh God’ over and over again. Because yes, of course, this is a David Fincher hitman movie, so there is no God the protagonist believes in and he tells us right at the beginning that he ‘Does. Not. Give. A. Fuck.’
Before long, The Killer is foregoing the green of the Dominican Republic, instead reaching out for the bright bumblebee yellow taxis of the USA and we’re off to another country, another method of murder, another target to be stared at disconcertingly by Fassbender, who gives a performance of such precision as to be worthy of his role as David in Prometheus.
In the end, in the seventeen seconds Netflix gave me to decide if I liked The Killer or not before suggesting other related things like Heat, Drive and Friends, I wasn’t sure. Everything was slick, professionally done as to embarrass most other film makers on a technical level. But perhaps the film verges on being as empty as its protagonist. The fight scene with The Brute is bone-crunchingly, well, brutal. Maybe that’s it. That the movie does so well and is so focused on its surface level is to the detriment of anything deeper, creating a situation that sixteen seconds after The Killer finishes you are sat there thinking, ‘Yeah was pretty good.’ Oh, and Tilda Swinton’s in it too.
