The Killer (David Fincher, 2023) (Patreon)

My lovely wife Jen is a much bigger fan of David Fincher than I am. She's liked most of his films but is especially taken with Zodiac, because for her it is the clearest and most detailed expression of what she feels is Fincher's consistent theme: the arrogance and failure of masculinity. I myself am a bit more ambivalent about post-Zodiac Fincher, because he seems to operate like what I'd call a Bad Formalist. Since The Social Network, he's seemed dead-set on making incredibly detailed films about stupid things. I mean sure, Gone Girl is amusing, but it's also shallow as hell. But he appears to be taken with the challenge of lavishing meticulous filmmaking onto rather pedestrian material. (I also feel the same way about De Palma, but at least he seems like he's having fun most of the time.)

The Killer is based on a French graphic novel series. Judging from the Killer (Michael Fassbender) and his incessant inner monologuing, it is an extremely glib property. As is so often the case these days, we cannot be certain whether The Killer is just a lunkheaded, self-important project or whether it is a film about lunkheaded self-importance. Based on the reviews I've read, one's appreciation of The Killer seems to be directly proportional to the extent that the viewer believes it's a comedy. But even then, how are we to take the jokes that don't land? Are we supposed to be amused by the fact that the Killer's fake names are all 1970s sitcom characters? Or are we intended to think that this man isn't half as clever as he thinks?

To be fair, it's quite evident that The Killer plays on convention by promising an assassin who lives and works according to a code, and then almost immediately abandons that code. After his girlfriend (Sophie Charlotte) is punished for his screw-up, he begins a systematic rundown of all the people who were involved, dispatching them with very little panache. Even the extended battle with The Brute (Sala Baker) is grinding and laborious, lacking the grace of John Wick or The Bride. Again, how one responds to this will depend on the extent to which it's taken as a sadistic, even Hanekesque withholding of traditional movie pleasures, or just a failure to achieve even the baseline of this kind of entertainment.

I saw someone on Bluesky suggest a new edit of The Killer that removes the voiceover. I'm not someone who's that keen on alternate versions -- let the text be the text -- but I do think that if Fincher gave us almost complete silence, and a severe reduction of character motivation, some of the subversive elements that others are seeing would probably come to the fore. Now, this is a moot point, because Netflix would never allow Fincher, or anyone, to throw good money after tepid. But as a thought experiment, it helps me see The Killer as less of a snarky piss-take and more like a noble but failed intellectual endeavor.