Official Trailer:
Movies about assassins are always intriguing and captivating if they are well made…Day of the Jackal, Collateral, The Killer (John Woo), No Country for Old Men, Nikita, Munich to call out a few. Well written villains and bad guys are more exciting to watch than the heroes 😀 Director David Fincher is not new to this domain. He has given us Zodiac, Seven, and Mindhunter which are about serial killers. David Fincher comes across as a person who is obsessive and striving for perfection as a director. He doesn’t let us down in The Killer.
The Killer is a deliberate and slow-paced peek into the mind of a murderer. Like the director, the assassin is a man of perfection and precision. Nearly 30 minutes opening stretch gives us the details we need to know about the assassin. We hear that from the assassin himself as a monologue. Opening is similar to Rear Window, where the assassin is patiently waiting for his target observing through a window in an abandoned WeWork space in Paris. The wait is over multiple days. He talks about his process, how it is purely logical, narrow focused. He doesn’t take sides. In his own words, it is not my place to formulate any opinion. No one who can afford me, needs to waste time winning me to some cause. How he justifies his action? He outlines his philosophy, in a population of 7.8 billion where 1.8 people die every second while 4.2 are born into the very same second, his actions don’t make any dent in those metrics 😳 It all comes down to preparation, attention to detail and redundancies. Leave no evidence. Avoid being memorable. This is one of the best openings stretches I have seen. It warms you up beautifully to what follows. For a man who has put in his 10000 hours, the unexpected happens, the impeccable assassin botches up and misses the target. One of the most precise people you may have come across makes a mistake. His personal life implodes. The perfectionist who said never get personal or never to improvise breaks his own rule. He has enough money in his foreign accounts, storage units in different cities, and multiple passports to disappear anywhere in the world. But he decides to go after people who assaulted his girlfriend and those who hired them.
His hunt takes us through the dots that he connects to get the link to the expert and finally the client. Each person in the dot is eliminated with meticulous planning. Pacing of the movie let the scenes breathe. One would expect the assassin to go through some soul searching when the consequences of his miss impacted his family. We expect a change of mind, feeling of empathy for his victims. But no, he doesn’t break his forbid empathy rule. Be warned that his cold, procedural approach may not be palatable for some people. He missed his precision once, but not again.
It is interesting how the director and the writer have effortlessly infused humor in the movie as the assassin goes on eliminating the targets. The assassin’s fake names, the throwback line in the elevator that elicits a laugh even in the tense situation, and the monologue quips (Who needs a Trojan Horse, when you’ve got Postmates. Cause everything’s airtight till the billionaire wants densuke watermelon). True to his philosophy, avoid being memorable, it is disturbing how an assassin like him can move around unseen in our world with people too distracted by something or other, as simple as wordle to delivery services.
The film remains singularly focused on the killer. The story is straight forward with no twists or sub-plots, but the director doesn’t explain fully the happenings. He leaves it to the audience to fill in the blanks. We are constantly on the move following the killer as he goes from one city to another. The action sequences are swift and effective. Michael Fassbender has given an excellent performance as the assassin. All actors in the movie are spot on and perfectly fit the roles they play. Sound design and cinematography are fine-tuned with the vision of the director. The Killer is a well-made character study of a professional assassin without a moral compass.