The Killer, review: Michael Fassbender’s murder spree is a sleek thrill
It wouldn’t be quite right to describe the protagonist of David Fincher’s new hitman thriller as “nameless”. In fact, he has more names than most of us would know what to do with. Felix Unger, Archibald Bunker, Reuben Kincaid, Thomas Jefferson: drawn from history and television, his aliases on passports and credit cards are legion, and he swaps between them as freely as the substitute number-plates that lock onto the anonymous vehicles he drives with a cold magnetic snap.
But then almost everything about this man, played with blank malevolence by Michael Fassbender, is interchangeable. His wardrobe is off-the-rack: no Alain Delon-style trench coat and fedora for him, or John Wick-ian bulletproof suit. He orders some of his kit from the Amazon smartphone app. As for his hideout, it’s a WeWork shared office space. Just his fondness for the music of Morrissey – either playing on the car stereo, or in his headphones as he lines up his next target – betrays the boilings of a psychopathic mind.
Adapted from a French graphic novel by Andrew Kevin Walker, the writer of Fincher’s 1995 breakthrough hit Seven, The Killer is a hitman revenge thriller pared down to its steeliest essentials. Given the complexity of its director’s work since 2007’s Zodiac, The Killer’s relative simplicity comes as a surprise.
But it’s also surely part of the point. Fassbender’s assassin likes to think his routine is honed to perfection, from his morning yoga stretches to his deep-cover outfits (dress like a German tourist, because no-one ever wants to talk to them), and he takes pride in accounting for every possible twist and turn in his work.
Why? Because just one single, hair’s-breadth mishap is all it would take to spark havoc. So of course that’s exactly what happens, around halfway through the film’s almost dialogue-free, Rear Window-channelling opening act. A tricky shot at a high-value target in Paris is blocked at the last second by the target’s mistress: the wrong blood sprays the walls, the wrong body drops to the floor, and suddenly Fassbender’s girlfriend, all the way in the Dominican Republic, discovers she has become a target.
So begins a globe-trotting revenge spree, in which Fassbender deals one by one with the various architects of this payback attack: his fixer in New Orleans (Charles Parnell) and his secretary Dolores (a terrific Kerry O’Malley), the Florida heavy who carried it out (Sala Baker), his suave New York facilitator (an extremely good-value Tilda Swinton), and lastly, the client (Arliss Howard) who hired Fassbender in the first place.
Much of the pleasure of the film is in procedure: watching someone work diligently and knowledgeably towards a goal that just happens to be murder. But a darkly fun tension emerges between its anti-hero’s internalised principles and how he actually behaves when pressed.
“Anticipate, don’t improvise” and “Always stick to the plan” are two of his favourite whispery mantras. And while Fassbender himself might not always stick to them, the film executes its purpose with a liquid carbon dioxide-billowing icy resolve.
On Netflix now
