David Fincher returns to more familiar territory after his black and white biopic Mank, with a glossy thriller following a globe-trotting hitman’s journey of revenge.
Michael Fassbender is the titular high-end assassin for hire, unnamed, and unknowable to a degree, despite his helpfully informative voiceover. He is waiting to kill someone in Paris. And waiting. And waiting. He does yoga. He listens to the Smiths. He eats McDonald’s for protein. He maintains a low heartbeat. And then something goes wrong… So begins a journey from the sweltering humidity of the Dominican Republic to the snowy chill of Chicago with various stops in various climes along the way to methodically find the next piece of the puzzle to track down the people responsible for punishing him for the Paris job going sideways. These six chapters will encompass bone-crunching brawls, reserved dinners, low cunning, hi-tech spycraft, and enigmatic conversations. And the motto to live by ‘Anticipate, don’t improvise’ will get repeated, and ignored, over and over again.
Fincher and Fassbender almost collaborated on Steve Jobs in 2015. Instead they collaborate now on a spy thriller which oddly feels less like Fincher than Soderbergh. Specifically Soderbergh’s Fassbender-featuring thriller Haywire. There are Fincher trademarks to be sure: a dramatically underlit and extended fist fight in Florida, a Paris workspace that seems to positively decay in the light cast on it by Mindhunter cinematographer Eric Messcherschmidt, certain familiar ways of depicting passage thru physical space. But there is a sense of Brechtian alienation from Soderbergh’s strange early 2010s phase that recalls Haywire – the hugely varied colours for each locale, the deprioritisation of dialogue for action, and spycraft. Even Trent Reznor and Atticus Finch seem to wander off for great chunks of time like they’d forgotten they were still scoring the movie. And Fassbender’s voiceover also goes AWOL for extended sequences.
To a degree Messrs Reznor and Ross are not needed because no fewer than eleven Smiths songs are used on the soundtrack. And this is where things get weird. I felt like ‘How Soon is Now?’ was going to be used to operatic effect for the long-in-the-making assassination, only for Fincher to then throw it away. As he did the next hit I thought would be something. In fact all the songs are thrown away. And that’s the point. I think. Fassbender’s character uses The Smiths as background music for working, so Fincher doesn’t pay them any more heed than the character would. The result is that the instrumental used for Cameron’s communing with pointillism in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off gets more artistic impact out of the Smiths than the entirety of The Killer. Which is so clever it’s dumb.
It’s unclear what effect Fincher was going for with all this, but Fassbender is as watchable as ever, and though there’s not much substance there certainly is style.
3/5
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