"The Killer": review

Michael Fassbender as the killer with many names

2023's "The Killer" stars Michael Fassbender, Arliss Howard, Charles Parnell (who's done at least two movies with Tom Cruise), Kerry O'Malley, Sala Baker, Sophie Charlotte, and Tilda Swinton. The plot is a simple one: an assassin's mission in Paris goes wrong when he accidentally shoots the wrong target; the assassin comes home to find his girlfriend has been tortured and almost killed when he was the actual target; the assassin must then kill his way through a trail of people to find whoever ordered the hit on him. The film is directed by David Fincher ("Seven"), the king of dark, noirish, slow-burn crime dramas (we'll forget, for a moment, that his name remains forever attached to "Alien 3," a troubled movie that actually went through several directors), and this film showcases Fincher at his cinematic best.

The Killer (Fassbender), we learn through his own voiceover narration, is an assassin who has been very good at his job, and this comes from a complete detachment from society and society's morals. Nothing he does—or so he insists—is personal. It's only about business, not good or bad, not this cause or that cause, not a belief in innate human goodness or badness. When we meet The Killer, he's perched in a still-unconstructed Paris office across from a hotel penthouse where he knows his target will eventually appear. He has a tense conversation with his handler, who is also, strangely, a former law professor who dissuaded The Killer from pursuing law and persuaded him to find ways to use the law to his advantage, hence The Killer's move to contract killing. As the Killer coolly narrates his state of mind and the principles that undergird his professionalism, we see the target suddenly appear in the apartment across the way. The Killer, rifle at the ready, takes aim, fires, and misses, hitting a hired dominatrix instead. He quickly packs up, removes all traces of himself, and skedaddles to Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic, where his residence is. After a long drive to his isolated abode, he discovers that his girlfriend (Charlotte) has been attacked by two people; she was tortured but managed to escape, and as she tells her boyfriend, she never told the two attackers anything about him. Something changes in The Killer, and things get personal. He makes it his mission to track down whoever it was who had ordered the hit on him—a trail that takes him through the two goons (Baker and Swinton) who attacked his girlfriend, his handler Professor Hodges (Parnell) as well as Hodges's assistant Dolores (O'Malley), and finally to the billionaire client who had put out the original hit on the target in Paris. Along the way, The Killer discovers that one of the goons, "The Expert" (Swinton), is a fellow assassin; the Killer and the Expert sit down for what will turn out to be The Expert's final dinner conversation. The big question for me, as is true with any movie focusing on assassins, is whether the main character survives to the end of the story. Ever since "American Beauty," in which Kevin Spacey's character narrates even from beyond the grave, there's been no guarantee that voiceover narration means the narrator is going to survive the tale.

If anything, the movie spends a lot of time driving home the idea that, for every professional assassin, his or her day will come. It's just the nature of the beast. There is some sort of compulsion that keeps the assassin in the game even after he's earned more than enough money to start a new life somewhere, and in the end, because everyone has flaws, the assassin's flaws will, in some way, end up being used against him. "The Killer" is based on a French graphic novel series called Le Tueur (The Killer) by Alexis "Matz" Nolent and Luc Jacamon. Without giving too much away, I can say that the story put on screen by Fincher and Fassbender has a more American than French ending, but with the specter of death still casting a neverending pall over the surviving characters.

What works best in the film is Michael Fassbender's cold, dead-eyed stare, which at some moments is truly chilling. He manages to capture Ian McShane's sangfroid in "Sexy Beast," Joe Pesci's murderous moment when he's intimidating Ray Liotta in the "Funny how?" scene in "Goodfellas," and Javier Bardem's almost reflectively homicidal Anton Chigurh in "No Country for Old Men." But as the film progresses, we see chinks in The Killer's armor, such as when Tilda Swinton's The Expert describes aspects of her own life as a killer that inadvertently resonate with our main character. The movie also folds in some subtle humor as we see every false ID that The Killer uses—and all the names are either sitcom characters or sitcom actors. We learn many names, but never The Killer's real name, which puts The Killer somewhere in league with hordes of demons (I am legion, for we are many—Mark 5:9). All the other actors, who do little more than stand in The Killer's way (aside from Sophie Charlotte as the girlfriend), also play their roles well; they are mostly cannon fodder as The Killer fights his way to the top of the food chain to confront the man who had ordered the hit on him.

What doesn't work for me, though, is how The Killer appears flawed from the beginning and only seems to unravel as the movie progresses. His voiceover narration gives the viewer the idea that he's a stone-cold professional, but his first act in the movie—our very first impression of how he is as an assassin—is to bungle his mission. This is a fault of the screenwriter (Andrew Kevin Walker), who should have begun the movie showing us a variety of smooth, successful hits to establish The Killer's ruthless proficiency before showing us his mission failure. Instead, The Killer seems to spend the movie both trying to make up for his original lapse and falling ever deeper into unprofessionalism as he becomes more emotionally engaged in his project of killing his way up the totem pole. This is, to my mind, a fundamental flaw in characterization. The flawed script ultimately fell short of Michael Fassbender's fine acting.

With that in mind, would I recommend "The Killer"? Let's put it this way: there are worse assassin-related films out there, and mainly thanks to Fassbender's portrayal, this may actually be one of the better ones, so I suppose I do at least cautiously recommend the movie. It stumbles in terms of screenwriting, specifically when it comes to story and characterization, but overall, it's a good, slow-burn thriller that will keep you guessing until the very end. Oh, yes: one last, interesting bit of trivia: actor Sala Baker, who plays the Brute (the barbaric, thuggish partner of Tilda Swinton's The Expert), is the same hulking New Zealander who played Sauron in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy. To put things mildly, his character in this movie gives The Killer a spot of trouble. I was reminded of the opening encounter between Dave Bautista and Ryan Gosling in "Blade Runner 2049."