AFTER THE AMBLING, muddled narrative of Mank (which didn’t juxtapose great against its lavish production values), it’s nice to see David Fincher back in David Fincher mode; I was surprised how much I enjoyed his new Netflix offering The Killer, a supremely nasty satire of permalancer culture in barely-even-trying action movie drag. In Fincher’s rendition of the eponymous French graphic novel written by Alexis "Matz" Nolent and illustrated by Luc Jacamon (adapted for the screen by Se7en screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker), Michael Fassbender plays a self-impressed freelancer hitman who finds his workaday bushido shaken by a botched hit in Paris. Soon some very evil (as opposed to our antihero’s strictly business evil-for-hire) people have located his safe house in the Dominican Republic and brutalized his girlfriend. His all-too-reasonable quest to take revenge (and regain control) leads him on an odyssey whose conclusion, as hack film critics like to say, raises more questions than it answers. For this, The Killer’s silky edits and smooth-gliding camerawork make it equal parts performance of precision (see the “Execution is Everything” tagline) and post-Gen X meditation on How We Live Under Neoliberalism.
© 2024 SM
Substack is the home for great culture