Michael Fassbender is a Human Leopard in David Fincher's Tale of Killer Capitalism

Being a lone wolf is lonely in 'The Killer,' one of the best single-sentence premise movies we've gotten since 'The Hurt Locker.'

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Killer AJ Soprano Invents The Tactical McMuffin

It feels like David Fincher is deliberately breaking every rule of screenwriting in the first two-thirds of The Killer, his latest so voiceover-driven that you can imagine Brian Cox-as-scriptwriting guru Robert McKee in Adaptation putting his fist through drywall. “Show don’t tell,” goes the adage, and Fincher seems like he’s doing the opposite. It’s not a crutch or an accident though, it’s a way to illustrate The Killer’s bedrock truth: that to be a hitman is to live almost entirely with the voices in your head.

Every once in a while we get a great movie out of a one-line premise. “War is a drug” describes basically the entirety of The Hurt Locker down to a frame, but adding anything else only would’ve detracted from its manic intensity. Even that quality itself furthered the theme—the best drugs being pure, unadulterated. The Killer is similarly lean, illustrating the loneliness of being a lone wolf.

Michael Fassbender, or Michael F. Assbender as I’m fond of calling him, seems to embody this leanness, in a character known to us only as “The killer.” We meet him in the middle of a stakeout, camped across from the balcony of his target’s high-rise apartment in Paris in his own jerry-rigged lair in an abandoned WeWork. The company’s name on the door functions as both a nice little joke (it’s fun to imagine a professional killer ordering Door Dash or using BetterHelp or soliciting any other kind of infantilizing modern tech company) and as a perfect symbol of the winner-take-all capitalism disguised behind a sheen of societal good that The killer himself embodies. Though maybe “murdering people from an abandoned WeWork” is one of those images one shouldn’t attempt to explain.

The killer tells us all about how boring stakeouts are, how professional killing is not a profession one should enter into without a high tolerance for personal boredom. He tells all about his tactics and his life philosophies, often delivered in the form of little aphorisms and personal mantras he’s developed over the years as he spies on his target, cleans his weapon, grabs a quick meal, and does some yoga in his flowery shirt and slim-fit pants—demonstrating enviable flexibility for a 46-year-old man. I like to imagine that I look just like Michael Fassbender when I step away from writing snarky blogs to stretch my aching back.

Being interesting to look at, and maybe even in a way that transcends any conscious choices, is an underrated part of acting. With his taut cheekbones, steely gaze, and trapeze artist’s frame, Michael Fassbender is the perfect actor for this role, probably the closest they could find to a human leopard. Much of the film sees him doing the human equivalent of spending all day up a tree, alternately stretching, napping, preening, and preparing for the lightning kill strike. He’s the perfect human cat; compelling both in his mundane, slothful narcissism, and for his lightning quick otherwordly killing abilities—not to mention the unlikely combination of the two.

David Fincher explores this dichotomy throughout the film, of Fassbender’s character living this sort of exotic lifestyle, of globe trotting unlimited wealth unbound by any of society’s laws or social mores, while also being a sort of run-of-the-mill self-centered misanthrope. The killer quotes Aleister Crowley to himself without remembering Crowley’s name, listens solely and religiously to the Smiths (only the singles, no deep cuts!) while eating egg McMuffins without the bun as praxis (“five minutes and three Euros for 20 grams of protein, who can beat that?”). Inventing the “tactical McMuffin” as a form of self-justification is as impressive as anything The killer does with a weapon. It also makes a a strange and beautiful sort of sense that this human leopard’s inner monologue might sound a lot like AJ Soprano in his Nietzche phase.

The killer’s narration fades a bit, though doesn’t disappear entirely, after he botches the Paris job and is forced to go on the run when his firm tries to cover their tracks. In pitting him against his former employers, Fincher positions The Killer alongside countless “secret agent hunted by his own agency” action movies, from Bourne to Mission Impossible. Only Fincher and his screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker (adapting from a graphic novel by Alex Nolent and Luc Jacamon) strip the trope of its usual glamour. Rather than hyper-competent super spies playing a high-stakes game of cat and mouse, we get a sort of deadly pissing contest conducted by bizarro world corporate drones doing their version of craven ass covering. What if “thrown under the bus” made slightly more literal?

Instead of breathless walk-and-talks and threats growled in front of banks of monitors showing blinking satellite footage, we get one guy, ordering his murder supplies on Amazon while trying his best to kill some other people who are also mostly just trying to survive in a system. This system, that seems to natually produce winners and losers and little in between, is familiar to us, only now with the stakes raised to their logical end. In that way, The Killer is about the banality of predatory capitalism.

And yes, that logline does sound like something Nietzsche-period AJ Soprano would be proud of writing. But again, some of the best movies grow out of simple truths, and The Killer is a particular kind of processed-based thriller that’s more about the simple pleasures of watching someone complete a task than some blinding insight. It’s like a non-stop heist film that doesn’t make the leaps of logic heist films always seem to now.

Just when you start to think “okay, maybe this is a little too much voiceover,” Tilda Swinton shows up as Fassbender’s convivial foil, who wants to die drinking expensive whiskey and seems to have chosen the same profession for the opposite reasons. And while it isn’t really an action movie, The Killer does have one fight scene more compelling and competently staged than anything in the last John Wick or Extraction, where the punches actually look like they hurt and the violence is consequential.

Fincher wore his artistic pretensions on his sleeve in Mank, making a formalistic homage to Citizen Kane and film noir in a film that neither needed it nor was improved by it. In doing “less” in The Killer, Fincher rediscovers his own style and creates a more effective throwback. The Killer feels like a capital M Movie from the days when thrillers and action films still had some foreplay.

Grade: A-

-We have a new Frotcast this week, discussing NFT enthusiasts getting blinded at a Bored Apes event!

-And a new Pod Yourself (The Wire) with Big Wos! We’re talking season 4 episode 9!