'The Killer' review: David Fincher plays the hits

Michael Fassbender stars as an assassin out for revenge in this deft espionage exercise

Steven Soderbergh watched The Killer four times in the span of a week last year.

The director, who released his annual viewing diary in January, was watching his friend and contemporary David Fincher’s latest movie in early August 2022.

Who knows how many times he watched it to give feedback since then; we’ll likely know next January.

The Killer has a striking similarity to Soderbergh’s underrated 2010 movie Haywire. Both films find their directors taking a straightforward, often superfluous espionage action story and stretching out the genre’s thrills in their distinctive styles.

Haywire, about an assassin (Gina Carano) out for revenge after a botched job, reveled in its MMA fighting lead’s physicality. Soderbergh kept the camera back far enough to capture Carano punching, kicking, choke-holding, and doing many other professional fighting things I don’t know the name of but enjoy watching very much.

Fincher, to no one’s surprise, does not leave room for that kind of spontaneity within the frame.

“Anticipate, don’t improvise,” Michael Fassbender’s killer says in voiceover throughout the film. Fincher is giving his fans a good old-fashioned wink.

That’s not to say this assassin lacks physicality, his movements are just eerily precise- a quick thrust of a weapon into a random street garbage can, the effortless lifting of a corpse’s head to put newspaper under it.

He seems to glide.

He’s not always on the move; quite to the contrary. When we see him in the first of the movie’s six chapters (and an epilogue), he’s watching, waiting, and doing yoga.

He’s also rambling on, in voiceover, about his work philosophy and methodical approach. He doesn’t seem cold and detached as much as he seems bored.

It’s in that seeming boredom that Fincher unlocks much of the humor in Andrew Kevin Walker’s script, which is based on a graphic novel of the same name. This first chapter, which feels like a Silicon Valley-era riff on Rear Window from the POV of Fassbender’s would-be killer, has him waiting hours on end surveilling a building from an under-construction WeWork facility.

When his shot finally arrives, he blows it. His employer makes the drastic mistake of trying to clean house; in an effort to find him, they send people to his hideout in the Dominican Republic and attack his girlfriend.

The movie devotes its remaining chapters to revenge, and this structure gives Fincher plenty to play with tonally. The Killer goes to a beige, nondescript office building and leaves with a body in a barrel. Confronting another hired gun one night in Florida leads to the movie’s sole big action set piece as the two throw each other around, over, and through a well-adorned home. Here, the hitman is forced to improvise as he goes toe-to-toe with someone twice his size.

The movie’s chattiest stretch is its most outright thrilling, though. Crashing an underworld power broker’s dinner in a chic, dimly lit restaurant and talking through the inevitability of her death is as sharply written, performed, and edited as many exchanges in The Social Network. It also doesn’t hurt that Fassbender’s verbal sparring partner is played by the great Tilda Swinton.

All of this (mostly) quiet carnage leads to a subdued and pleasantly unsatisfying conclusion. What does that mean? Without spoiling the ending, the rug is quietly pulled out from under the entire revenge enterprise. It’s not subversive, just surprising.

The Killer is by no means Fincher’s best film, but it is a relaxed and confident mixtape that allows him to play around with forms and tones he’s made entire features about. Outside of the college dorm poster staple Fight Club, he’s probably best known for his films about hunting killers (Se7en and Zodiac).

Here, one is front and center, and he’d rather be anywhere else.

The Killer is in theaters now and streaming on Netflix Nov. 10.