Michael Fassbender
“THE KILLER” My rating: B (Netflix)
118 minutes | MPAA rating: R
David Fincher’s latest is a minimalist epic about a contract killer who appears to have no personality whatsoever.
Despite all this, it is a wildly entertaining effort.
Michael Fassbender is our unnamed protagonist, whom we meet in an under-renovation apartment in Paris. He’s been there for days awaiting the arrival in the building across the street of his target. We don’t know who he’s supposed to kill. or why.
All we know is that the Killer exhibits an astonishing level of patience. He passes the time scanning the street through a scope and doing yoga.
In the film he says almost nothing. Well, that’s not quite true. In the first 30 minutes he gives us, in narration, a sort of primer on hitman etiquette. In this he is quite chatty, holding forth on the necessity of anticipation and the dangers of improvisation. As for the moral consequences of his actions… there’s no mention of that. Doesn’t seem to matter.
The screenplay by Andrew Kevin Walker, Alexis Nolent and Lucy Jacamon is astonishingly straightforward.
The Paris job goes wrong. The Killer flees to his palatial home base in the Dominican Republic only to find that rival killers from his employer have beat him there, torturing his girlfriend (Sophie Charlotte) so badly that she’s in the hospital.
This calls for revenge. Quickly, methodically and implacably the killer goes about eliminating the threats against him.
Tilda Swinton
That means paying a visit to the crooked New Orleans lawyer (Charles Parnell) who hands out his deadly assignments, the Florida thug (Sala Baker) who beat up his girl, the thug’s New York-based co-killer (Tilda Swinton) and finally the impossibly rich mover and shaker (Arliss Howard) who ordered the Paris hit.
As I mentioned, the Killer rarely says anything. Not so most of his targets, who when facing death become remarkably loquacious. A lot of good it does them. (The only one as silent as the Killer is the hulking goon in Florida; the two of them have a mano-a-mano smackdown for the ages.)
Now this all sounds terribly grim, and it should be pointed out that “The Killer” is often slyly amusing. For example, our protagonist has a collection of fake identities (with attendant IDs, passports, credit cards and other documentation) in the names of classic TV sitcom characters: Felix Unger, Oscar Madison, Archibald Bunker, etc.
And then there’s the Killer’s clothing choices. In voiceover he announces that the whole idea is to be so freaking bland that nobody can remember you; for much of the film he wanders around looking like a suburban dad at Disney World.
There’s no moral to “The Killer,” hardly any plot and certainly no characters you’d want to actually meet (okay, maybe the girlfriend, but she got beat up protecting a man she knows is a murderer).
Nevertheless, it’s a fun ride precisely because of its menagerie of cooly calculating/brutal/smooth talking creeps.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 