David Fincher is well known for making grimy, tough-to-watch movies that are perfect down to the last detail. But Fincher doesn’t get enough credit for being hilarious, and The Killer is the funniest movie of 2023.
The clues were there right from the beginning. The poster for The Killer features an oil-painted portrait of Micheal Fassbender pointing a gun at the audience. Ooooh, scary! But in the title, “The Killer,” the letter i is lying on its side, blood pouring out of its tittle (yes, that’s what the dot over the i is called; you’re welcome.) Pretty whimsical for a movie sold as a return to form for the guy who made Se7en.
The Killer starts with Fassbender monologuing to himself in an abandoned office space colonized by WeWork. (In a joke that was impossible to predict, WeWork announced bankruptcy the week the movie came out.) He complains about how boring being a hitman is, and Fincher proves this by forcing us to watch Fassbender nap, work out, and eat Egg McMuffins without the bread.Â
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What he says sounds cool, but what he’s doing isn’t. He even tells us he’s not smart, just patient. It isn’t until his target comes home that the sniper rifle appears, and, in my screening, you could feel the guys who thought this was going to be David Fincher’s John Wick sit forward in their seats.
Spoiler alert: this cool, collected, gas-station-boiled-egg-eating yoga fanatic misses his shot and kills an innocent woman. He quickly cleans his workspace and flees on an electric scooter in a chase that is as thrilling, tense, and well-made as anything Fincher has done — except our hardened hero is dressed like a German tourist with a stupid bucket hat and riding an electric scooter than sounds like a Pokemon squeezed through a pasta maker.
Fincher and Se7en screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker spend the next two hours undercutting their cool action-hero premise and actively mocking their hero — and their audience. Fassbender returns home to find his girlfriend in the hospital in a scene scored to The Smiths’ “Girlfriend In A Coma,” the only band he seems to listen to. (Every needle drop in this movie is funny.)
In any other movie, this would be a big, dramatic moment, and all the men in the audience would imagine what they would do if someone hurt their Old Lady, justifying the holy retribution Fassbender is about to deliver. But even the length of this scene is a joke: Fassbender spends about two minutes at his injured girlfriend’s side before he’s off to smoke some fools.
The fools are a hapless cab driver, his former employer, the client, and two other hitmen. Fassbender uses, then shoots the cab driver in the head for no reason other than he drove the killers around. Fincher is saying to us, “Ya like this, ya sickos? Is this justified?”
Some people will say yes. I mean, this is our hero, after all. When Fassbender gains access to his employer’s office using the ubiquity of FedEx and the invisibility of the working class, we’re back in the cool hitman movie we were sold. But Fincher gives us just enough of what we want, then yanks it away. With the mathematical precision of a narrator, Fassbender predicts that shooting a 60-something-year-old in the chest with nine-inch nails (of course) will give him six minutes of interrogation time before the man dies. Instead, he dies almost instantly. Oops.
It’s played for laughs, but you could still think that Fincher is making some statement about his hero’s ability to improvise. It doesn’t last. In the next scene, Fassbender snaps the neck of the innocent woman who worked for his handler. Sure, he makes it look like an accident so her kids will get her life insurance, but there’s no getting around it: this guy is a murderer.
Fincher isn’t interested in “why” we identify with this psycho. He’s been at the forefront of American culture for too long to ask obvious questions. Fincher knows why we love this guy: a hot movie star plays him, and he gets to do the one thing almost everyone dreams of doing: be good at killing people.
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Here’s the thing, though: Fassbender isn’t very good at it! His OCD tendencies — scrubbing down surfaces, avoiding potential threats, clocking security cameras — gradually disappear as he descends into a killing frenzy. The funniest joke in the movie is when Fassbender orders a key fob copier off Amazon right in front of the building he’ll use it on!
It reminded me of the climax of American Psycho, when Bateman goes on a rampage, shooting random bystanders and blowing up cop cars with zero repercussions. You’re left wondering, is this all in his head? Or is the message that our society is so broken, so blind, so rigged in the favor of men like Fassbender that he can get away with all this, no problem? Fincher loves telling stories about the ineffectiveness of the police and the justice system. In this, it is entirely non-existent. There are zero cops in this movie.
Fincher’s team: screenwriter Walker, cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt, composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, and editor Kirk Baxter are all in on the joke. They know what we expect when we read the SEO-rich headline “Netflix announces new hitman thriller by David Fincher starring Micheal Fassbender.” They mock our puerile bloodlust at every opportunity. Could this team have said, “Let’s make the hardest, coolest action movie ever?” For sure! The kitchen fight in the middle of The Killer is on par with any American fight scene this year. But they did something different, something smarter, something funnier. Something mean.
They created one of the best movies in a year stuffed with great projects by some of our best directors because the biggest joke in The Killer is on Fincher himself. This workaholic obsessive, famous for having complete control over projects that consistently make massive cultural and financial impacts, just came off his first failure in 30 years. Mank, a passionate project for Fincher about the guy who wrote Citizen Kane, came and went with a shrug.
It’s pretty easy to see the parallels: Netflix gave him a ton of money to make something, and it didn’t work out, so now he has to pay the price — just like a certain Killer. It’s one big joke on American action movie culture. “Oh, you all hated the movie I made for my dad? Here’s the coolest movie you’ve ever seen about how John Wick is a fucking idiot.”
Fincher’s movies are dense, but they’re not complicated. The thesis for all his projects, from Alien 3 to Zodiac to House of Cards, is consistent: America sucks. We’re all complicit in the sucking, and there’s nothing we can do about it, so relax and enjoy the violence.
And we lap it up. It’s awesome watching people, mostly men, struggle with how they feel about this movie. You don’t have to look far for guys squirming under Fincher’s gaze, wishing he’d made something as unambiguous as Se7en, which, lol. Those people should re-watch Gone Girl.
