David Fincher’s new hitman film, The Killer is a movie about a killer-for-hire, his personal code, his hands-on trade, and the mess that the murder business can make of one’s personal life. But, more importantly, The Killer is a movie about hitman movies and about mundane, mainstream culture in general. It’s a thriller packed with scenes of quiet waiting, a globetrotting revenge story set in budget hotel suites, a white knuckle ride in a Hertz rent-a-car.
Two of the most audacious elements of The Killer are its conspicuous lack of action and the running inner monologue of its antihero protagonist. The movie opens with the nameless killer (Michael Fassbender) in an abandoned WeWork office, spying on a luxury apartment hotel suite, waiting for his target to arrive home. The idea of a hired murderer camping out alone in the brand name co-working space is a hilarious bit of irony. So are the more than 20 minutes that open The Killer in which nearly nothing happens, right before everything goes wrong. Like many hitman movies, The Killer is a film about precision — and the lack of it. While the killer sleeps, does yoga, fiddles with his Smartwatch and listens to The Smiths, he also talks to himself. “Stick to your plan. Anticipate. Don’t improvise. Trust no one. Never yield an advantage. Fight only the battle you’re paid to fight. Forbid empathy.” It’s an interesting mix of affirmation and philosophizing that should keep him free from entanglements and cool when the pressure is on. And it works, until it doesn’t.
Fincher understands that the best hitman movies are procedurals that take viewers into the shadow world of the killers that may move among us. We want to see exotic weapons and hidden compartments, fake passports, untraceable vehicles, hideouts and icy cool killers in slick disguises. We’re invited into an assassin’s secret life in Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai (1967) and in the John Wick Trilogy we are treated to an entire hidden underworld of crime and criminals. Fincher delivers the goods here, but at a discount: the killer drives rented cars and eats at McDonalds; he flies coach and his headquarters is just a storage unit big enough to hold a van; his only disguise is “German tourist” in a bucket hat and shades; his aliases are all lifted from characters in television sitcoms.
The references, however sly, to other genre masterpieces lend the film a metanarrative quality and viewers know they’re watching a movie about movies when the killer uses the unattached scope from his gun to spy the scene at his target’s apartment. The POV shots find the viewer looking through the camera’s lens as much as looking through a rifle scope. When the film’s long quiet opening shatters with a chaotic twist, Fincher mostly gets to have it both ways: The Killer is a film about movies about assassins that we can just relax and enjoy. In the meantime his murderous protagonist gets to ponder ideals of balance and precision in a world that rarely allows for much of either.
Jim Jarmusch’s 2009 film The Limit’s of Control is a hitman movie featuring international destinations, intentional lack of action and Tilda Swinton, and we should be hearing more comparisons between these films. Jarmusch literally eliminates all the action from his film, omitting the scenes that arguably define the assassin movie genre. It would be interesting to see a cut of Fincher’s film with no internal monologue. It would be slower and sadder. It would be more solemn, but not necessarily more sincere. I think this killer really is just a smart ass trying to cope like the rest of us. In one scene he even quotes Popeye the Sailor: “I am what I am.”
The Killer is currently streaming on Netflix.
Joe Nolan is a critic, columnist and performing singer/songwriter based in East Nashville. Find out more about his projects at www.joenolan.com.