Venice 2023: David Fincher’s Precision Assassin Thriller ‘The Killer’
by Alex Billington
September 3, 2023
This is the story of an assassin. This is the story of what happens when an assassin makes a mistake on his mission. This is an assassin story we’ve seen 100 times before. This is a film about an assassin who is very good at what he does and sticks to his plan and doesn’t make mistakes. Until he does. And this is about what happens next. We all know this story. Sometimes I wonder if every assassin or hitman film is the same. They all repeat the same tropes, same story beats, rarely ever adding anything new or changing things up. There’s only so much one can really say with an assassin story anyway (note: this is debatable, but that’s for another day). David Fincher’s latest feature film The Killer is once again the same assassin story we’ve seen in so many other films, including Melville’s iconic classic Le Samouraï. It even reminded me of Tarantino’s Kill Bill: Vol. 2, with Beatrix finally making her way up to the very top of it all, to meet Bill himself, and confront him and save herself. Even if this is a story we’ve seen many times before, it’s still a damn fine assassin film.
Fincher’s The Killer is his 12th film. The screenplay is written by Andrew Kevin Walker (who also wrote Fincher’s Se7en) and is based on Matz’s & artist Luc Jacamon’s graphic novel “The Killer”. It’s closer in tone & style to Fight Club and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and is more engaging and riveting to watch than Mank, released a few years ago (also on Netflix). The film is making its world premiere at the 2023 Venice Film Festival in the Main Competition, a fitting place for a slick assassin film like this, as Venice has shown plenty of assassin films over the years. After a fateful near-miss, a hitman battles his employers, and also himself, on an international manhunt he insists isn’t personal. Michael Fassbender stars as the unnamed “The Killer”, who narrates most of the film from a meta perspective, explaining himself and his expertise as we’re watching the story play out. In the opening, his mission goes wrong with a very typical “oops, someone got in the way of the target at the last second” mistake that is a blatant assassin trope. The rest of the film is him trying to clean up the typical “response” from everyone involved when a mission doesn’t go as planned.
What makes The Killer a damn fine film is that it’s so precisely shot and Fassbender is so precise in his slick performance. It’s literally a film about precision. With Fincher at the helm, it’s entrancing and thrilling to watch anyway, even if you know where it’s going, even if you’ve heard everything he has to say about hitmen and morality, even if it isn’t doing anything new or different or clever. Fincher’s goal seems to be to make a streamlined, no frills, highly focused film – without an ounce of the complexities or grandeur of many of his past films. And that’s totally fine. It’s still entertaining to watch. However, I do wish there was a bit more to it… Something more it was saying, or commenting on, than the same old, endlessly repeated philosophical proclamations about assassins. Yes, we know: the morality of professional killing is debatable in the grand scheme of things; he’s just doing his job to get paid and take care of his loved ones; it’s not personal and he has no stakes in the kills; he doesn’t care about the politics or the target, he just wants to do his job well and cleanly. Fair enough. Even the score by Fincher regulars Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross is the same as before.
The opening is the best part of the film, the rest of simply goes through the motions of an assassin thriller. Fassbender’s opening monologue is outstanding, the kind of monologue college students are going to print as graphic text and hang on their walls. I’m even looking forward to watching it again, though I’m certain I won’t discover anything new. I just want to drift into the cinematography by DP Erik Messerschmidt and admire the perfectly shot, perfectly lit scenes. Damn it’s so nice to see this. Fincher’s attention to detail with every last pixel makes it entirely enthralling. There’s an impressive amount of gripping tension as The Killer makes his way around the world (and back) pulling off kills and staying ahead of everyone else every step of the way. Even if his killing isn’t your jam, watching him meticulously control & manage evidence and figure out how to outsmart all those that think they might outsmart him is still entertaining. That’s impossible to deny. Fincher’s ultimate satisfaction this time is in making a meticulous film about a meticulous assassin, even without anything else more going on. Even Tilda Swinton’s brief appearance doesn’t add much to it.
Is there a point to The Killer, another assassin film with a generic, seen-it-100-times-before plot? Probably not. Perhaps it’s that we should try to live our lives more like he does (sans killing, of course) without trying to add more meaning to everything than is necessary? Or maybe Fincher just needed to get his own precise hitman film out of the way, so he can add it to his filmography and move on to tell other stories again. It’s not his best, though also irrefutably not a bad film. Whatever the case, what he says is true: it is better that you never cross paths with or ever see him anywhere. Better you don’t end up with an assassin on your trail.
Alex’s Venice 2023 Rating: 7.5 out of 10
Follow Alex on Twitter – @firstshowing / Or Letterboxd – @firstshowing
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