The Killer

 The Killer is a morose thriller, skillfully directed by David Fincher, and starring Michael Fassbender in the title role; the movie can be seen on Netflix.  It's baffling and, more or less, inconsequential; Fassbender glowers and strives mightily to banish any expression at all from his handsome, gaunt face.  He murders a succession of bad guys in scenes that are mostly plausible but don't add up to anything much.  The film is principally interesting in that it features an unreliable first-person narrator -- the assassin provides a voice-over commentary to the film and everything that he says turns out to be radically untrue.  It's not entirely certain as to whether Fincher and his writers intend the first-person narrator to be so decisively clue-less about what he is doing and why -- in fact, it's possible that the script is simply botched in some way.  But the effect of the film is eccentric -- just about everything that the brooding, cynical killer tells us is a complete mischaracterization of what we actually see happening.  The picture is very well-made and fairly well-paced, although, ultimately, the device of the unreliable narrator has really no place to go and, so, in the end the film succumbs to tedium.  It's premises are all generic and very formulaic -- the concept of the lone Uebermensch murderer, detached from all human connections -- the perspective that the movie argues -- dates back to the noir films in the late forties and, of course, was most effectively developed in some of Michael Mann's pictures, most notably Thief and, later, Heat.  The only thing surprising about the movie is that the narrator whose point-of-view informs every shot in the picture is completely unaware that he is misrepresenting everything that we see.

The unnamed killer is first shown in Paris, waiting to fire a kill-shot at some politician or plutocrat who richly deserves murder.  The killer repeats various mantras about his profession in a voice-over narration and argues, with a little too much heat, that he is different from other people and that you would not want to cross paths with him.  The assassin says that he must execute the plan that he is made, show no empathy, trust no one, do nothing for which he is not paid and not confuse his own personal interests with the mission that he is supposed to execute.  We see him waiting for the optimum moment to gun down his victim.  But the poor fool is sitting in cold rooms with a little space heater, obsessively doing exercises (he's like the clothes-horse Richard Gere in American Gigolo -- Fincher's chilly mise-en-scene looks a lot like Paul Schrader's films) and sleeping for some reason on a purgatorial pallet, a sort of spartan plank that seems horribly uncomfortable, that must induce sleeplessness and, therefore, exhaustion, and that, perhaps, accounts for the botched murder attempt.  Although he presents himself as fantastically competent and cold-blooded, the assassin is, in fact, completely inept, and, even, cowardly. He misses his shot, putting a bullet through an inoffensive dominatrix entertaining his prey, and, then, like a scared schoolgirl, panics and flees across Paris.  The movie is maddening -- from an objective point of view, the killer is a complete failure and a sissy to boot.  But he proclaims himself as a Nietzschean super-man.  Needless to say, failure is not an option in this profession and the killer's shadowy handlers decide to erase traces of the botched contract killing.

The assassin flees to the Dominican Republic where he apparently owns a pleasant beach-side estate.  There he finds that his girlfriend has been raped, mutilated and tortured in retaliation for his screw-up.  This pushes our supposedly rational and cold-blooded killer over the edge and he decides to murder everyone involved in mistreating his mistress.  He kidnaps the taxi-driver, gets information from him and, then, kills the poor guy.  Next, he goes to New Orleans where there is a shady lawyer who originally recruited the assassin from law school (of all places) to turn him into a contract killer.  This guy placed the hit and, presumably, knows who attacked the killer's girlfriend.  The assassin murders the shyster and, then, kills his secretary for a good measure.  In the course of abusing the lawyer, the assassin has learned the identities of the other two thugs who abused his mistress.  He hunts them down.  The first is living in Florida.  The stupid assassin messes up this attack and ends up in a brutal and ridiculously protracted mano y mano fight with this guy, a gouging, groin-crushing gladiatorial combat that takes up about a reel and is totally absurd -- while this fight happens, the bad guy's pit bull is sleeping, knocked out by pooch benedryl, but, later, aroused to pursue our hero from the villain's squalid compound.  A little the worse for wear (presumably with a couple compression fractures in his spine, a half dozen broken ribs and some maxillofacial damage), the assassin flies to New York City where he confronts the other enforcer who mangled his girlfriend.  This person is described as tall and looking like a "cue tip" -- and, to our surprise and, even, gratitude, turns out to be the pale and serpentine Tilda Swinton.  After a bizarre colloquy with Swinton in her favorite restaurant -- she drinks a flight of whisky and offers the hero some tapas plates -- the assassin takes her out on the cold docks and slaughters her.  She has led him to the man who placed the contract killing in Paris, a loathsome plutocrat himself, a bit like a haggard Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk.  By this point, the hero has transferred all of his ill-gotten millions to his account in the Dominican Republic and plans to hang up his spurs after dealing with the evil businessman.  (We hear the mogul berating his hapless employee on the phone.)  For some inexplicable reason, the hero decides to spare this guy, who is really the most wicked of all the villains, and, after giving him some fearsome warnings -- "I will put radioactive pellets in your coffee and cause you to die from total facial necrosis" -- the assassin departs.  We last see him enjoying a mojito on the beach with his now recuperated girlfriend.  The ending made no sense to me.  If these villains were willing to dispatch groups of contract killers to attack the hero and mangle his girlfriend, why are they now inclined to stand-down --I suppose, maybe, it's because all the bad guys are dead except the big boss.  In any event, at last, in the final lines in the movie, the self-aggrandizing hero admits he's just like everyone else.   

The movie doesn't make any sense.  It's very hard, for instance, to imagine the elegant Tilda Swinton with her exquisite coiffure and high-fashion clothes and her fine taste in whiskey, associating with the foul-mouthed Hispanic muscle man that tortured the girl and that the assassin had to slaughter in Florida.  The whole thing has the aura of a fantasy constructed by Cormac McCarthy on an off-day.  Every known cliche about contract killers is deployed in the movie.  And, of course, the killer is completely without self-awareness that all the sub-Nietzschean epigrams that he has spouted are belied by his actions.  He claims that he must act without improvisation and, according to plan, but most of what he does in the movie is rather ineptly improvised.  He claims that he will not fight in battles for which he is not paid -- but he spends the whole movie pursuing a course of completely self-interested and uncompensated revenge, obviously the outcome of wounded feelings.  He asserts that he is disinterested in his professional objectives and cool and calculating to a fault -- but this is the opposite of what the movie shows us in which his every action is motivated by his own emotions.  And every scene demonstrates his claim to superhuman efficiency and perfection in committing murders is a farce -- he gets everything more or less wrong.  Far from being a mechanical, dispassionate killing machine, he behaves hysterically, on questionable impulses, and without earning so much as a penny in his quixotic quest to avenge a girlfriend who has about six mumbled lines (her jaw is broken) throughout the movie.  The film is very effectively shot and edited, but, truth to tell, it's not very good and, more than a little monotonous. Pretentiousness is fatal to this sort of movie and the picture has some of this defect.

(A couple of other points are worth noting.  The movie is based on a comic book, something that, perhaps, explains it's weird stupidity.  The picture is not without humor.  The hero, whose real name we never learn, has dozens of passports.  Here are the names on the passports that we are shown:  Felix Unger (from The Odd Couple Tv show), Archibald Bunker (All in the Family), Oscar Madison (again The Odd Couple), Reuben Kincaid (from The Partridge Family), Lou Grant from The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Sam Malone (Ted Danson on Cheers and Frasier), Robert Hartley (Bob Newhart on his show), and George Jefferson (who "are movin' on up to the East Side" in The Jeffersons).)