The Killer is an actively fatigued film that seems to carry the burden of existing with every scene. It’s the latest film from David Fincher, the great American master who’s found a new creative home in Netflix and has subsequently gone flat. His filmography, known for its perverted cynicism, bleak humor, and virtuoso filmmaking is filled with masterpieces or near masterpieces, but his last two films, Mank and now this, appear to point toward an emeritus stage. In fact, The Killer seems to reference that explicitly. Our protagonist, a nameless contract killer played by Michael Fassbender, is a craftsman that has become almost bored by the perfection of his execution (no pun intended). He requires an unexpected mistake to shock his system. One would hope that The Killer would do the same thing for Fincher, but it’s unfortunately not the case.

The film is based on a French graphic novel and was adapted by Andrew Kevin Walker. Walker is probably most famous for writing the script for Se7en, the first great film Fincher made and a work of such extreme nihilism, it still feels shocking twenty-eight years later. To the extent to that Se7en and The Killer have any dialogue with one another, it’s adversarial, as if the cool aloofness of the latter film actively disdains the melodrama of the former. Fincher does find the humor in being so actively intertextual with his own work, and his unquestioned talent as a stylist is on full display throughout The Killer, a movie that takes every opportunity for flourish with each subsequent killing. But where Se7en used the creativity of the murders to foster dread, The Killer only reinforces aesthetic; the kind of slick, fashionable violence that Fincher’s movies usually stand against.

The film’s opening scene is a drawn-out sequence that takes place in an empty WeWork office in Paris. Fassbender’s killer waits ponderously, staring across the street waiting for his next target. The scene, perhaps a full reel, is made up of the killer’s compulsive voiceover, speaking to the exacting strategy and unbreakable discipline of his profession. It’s the movie’s first sick joke that after nearly twenty minutes of hearing about his commitments to perfection, he ends up botching the job. The mistake sets off a chain reaction of violence that spills into his hermetically-sealed personal life, which prompts a revenge tour through various countries across the globe. Part John Wick and part Kill Bill (but absent the sincerity of either), The Killer feels less like a vengeance tale and more about the eternal frustrations of maintaining your day job.

There are a few highlights, including a nighttime fight that barrels through the West Florida home of an indestructible heavy (Sala Baker). The undisputed best scene stars Tilda Swinton as a fellow hitman who shares fine dining and existential conversation with our killer; a scene so flush with elegance that it only highlights the vapid nature of everything that surrounds it. A final showdown in the movie’s closing moments is, by design, a disappointment. Fincher has always been clever in the ways he denies you the catharsis that you’re expecting, but the ending here feels cynical at best and thoughtless at worst. It’s a joke at the expense of an audience that wants him to play the hits, but in his defiance he cuts off his nose to spite his face (cue the ‘Pride’ death scene from Se7en).

I don’t want to fully blame this seemingly indifferent movie on Netflix, but the evidence is mounting that their blank check approach to courting respectable artists lacks vision. I enjoyed The Killer more than Mank, but neither film really meets the standard we expect from Fincher. Mank‘s ambition never truly overcame Fincher’s sentimentality toward the material. At the very least, I can appreciate The Killer‘s sense of humor, as hostile as it may be. The biggest tragedy is the uninteresting visual palette. It screens like a dumbing down of his cinematic complexity. I’m used to watching Fincher and seeing at least one sequence that I’d define as remarkable, but that hasn’t been the case in his two-film Netflix era. There’s a tossed-off quality to The Killer, as if it was made to be streamed at home. That isn’t a sin in and of itself, but it’s a stake in the heart to those who love Fincher as an auteur.

 

Directed by David Fincher