Fincher's THE KILLER: An Entertainment with a hidden agenda by Craig Hammill

It’s not often I get to see new movies these days with four children (one just born a month ago!) and Secret Movie Club to run. I’m not complaining. I wouldn’t have it any other way. But watching new movies is critical to keeping Secret Movie Club fresh and dynamic so I figure out how to do it in the nooks and crannies of my life.

Plus, there’s no way I’m passing up the chance to catch the new David Fincher. And much to my surprise, for the second time in as many viewings, a movie that received positive if qualified word of mouth struck me as MUCH better than the reaction it was getting.

Fincher’s new film The Killer stars Michael Fassbender as a killer-for-hire by shadowy rich powerful folks who want to kill other shadowy rich powerful folks. When Fassbender’s Killer botches a Paris job, he returns to his Dominican Republic hideaway to find his romantic partner brutalized to within an inch of her life. Furious (though you wouldn’ t know it from Fassbender’s near expressionless hilarious controlled performance), he goes on a kind of mono-focused rampage to find who’s behind it all.

The Killer feels like Fincher working in entertainment mode a la Panic Room, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. If Fincher, like Martin Scorsese and John Ford, adopts the “one for them, one for me” strategy of survival moviemaking by making a commercially successful picture so he can earn a risk on the picture after that , The Killer feels like “one for them”.

That being said, it’s a much more hilarious and subversive movie then I think first meets the eye. Many reviews suggested that Fassbender’s repetitive voice over and all 80’s Smiths music, all the time approach wears thin as the movie goes on. I beg to differ. This strikes me as exactly the point. The Killer (he’s never named) seems clearly sociopathic, maybe even on the spectrum, OCD, from the start. Of course he’d obsess and repeat himself. And the more he does, the more we should get worried.

His obsessive, repetitive voice over actually struck me as brilliant character development.

You realize very early on in this movie that you’re being asked to empathize with a hero/conduit who kills for money. And I actually found it more and more unsettling as the movie went on that we were going to get no other viewpoint but his.

Fincher tips his hand/hat only in the very last shot and I thought it was a glorious payoff. No spoilers here, you’ll have to see the movie. And I don’t want to oversell it. But I will say this, like everything else in The Killer, the payoff in the final shot is about attention to a small detail.

While I wouldn’t rank The Killer as top-tier Fincher, it is pretty damn good. And the Florida bone-crunching fight sequence between Fassbender and a steroidal beefy fellow assassin (Sala Baker credited as “The Brute”) may be the best sequence Fincher has put together in awhile. While I’m still a big proponent of shooting on 35mm film if possible, Fincher uses digital in exhilirating ways. Here, in this brutal no mercy or compassion fight, Fincher appears to be using some kind of post-production jitter effect so that the frame itself actually jitters with each punch, kick, stab, crash, and fall.

Also, the movie goes out of its way to include A LOT of current corporate brands. McDonalds, WeWork, Amazon all grab the spotlight for a moment. And this strikes me as more than clever product placement. The fact that the Killer’s ultimate climactic showdown is with some kind of lonely aging tech-nerd billionaire CEO type (Arliss Howard credited as “The Client”) feels very clever as well. There’s some kind of comment being made here on where we’re at as a global culture. And it feels like our sociopathic OCD mono-focused Killer who, ultimately, feels a little vacuous if professional, is just a cog in a much bigger sociopathic OCD mono-focused culture. And consequently, ironically, we feel some empathy for him. There’s even a great late bit of voice over where he seems to acknowledge as much getting as close to genuine self-awareness as anyone in the picture ever gets.

Fincher’s Mank seemed to be a subversive warning to all would-be moviemakers through the cloak of period piece that the movie industry is just as toxic and mercenary as you think it is. Gone Girl seemed to be a pretty hilarious dark comedy that illuminated a lot of loveless marriages by setting a bonfire to the hypocrisies of the institution. Even The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, a Fincher that feels more workmanlike than inspired, has a brilliant late third act moment where the villain chastizes the hero (and by proxy society) for being too polite to make the correct decision because the hero was afraid of offending the villain, a passive-aggressive sickness many of us suffer from.

There is a pathology beneath the veneers and surfaces of our modern world that The Killer is detailing. You don’t need me to tell you that. We all know it in our atrophying hearts and intellects, drying up more and more as we replace face to face time with mindless smart phone screen scrolling.

We may not kill people for a living but that may be because we’re too busy doing the bidding of the powerful uberrich folks by killing and zombifying ourselves. They don’t even need to pay us. We pay them for their products. And Fincher knows it.

Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club.