![]() Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial during the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. I mean, it’s David freakin’ Fincher! Let’s just say that the protagonist’s professional philosophy sums up my feelings toward this solidly-crafted but emotionally reticent film: “It comes down to preparation, attention to details, redundancies, redundancies and redundancies.” Has Netflix stolen some of Fincher’s cinematic magic? The second tier includes engrossing films like “The Game” (1997), “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (2008), “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” (2009) and “Gone Girl” (2014), landing “The Killer” somewhere down around “Mank” (2020). The craftsmanship is undeniable, but its cold distance keeps it far from Fincher’s undisputed Mount Rushmore of “Se7en” (1995), “Fight Club” (1999), “Zodiac” (2007) and “The Social Network” (2010). This is the type of methodical movie that would be better experienced on the big screen, featuring stylish POV shots through binoculars and sniper-rifle scopes as the protagonist gazes through various windows and tails his victims down streets and staircases. Many mainstream viewers will find the pacing a bit slow, particularly when streaming it on Netflix with the unfortunate distractions of home. While these sections create an episodic feel, the whole is less than the sum of its parts. ![]() Don’t get it twisted, though the tone mostly bends toward the dramatic as Fassbender tells himself to “stick to the plan,” “trust no one” and “forbid empathy,” talking to himself like Guy Pearce in Christopher Nolan’s “Memento” (2000).īased on the French graphic novel series by Alexis “Matz” Nolent and Luc Jacamon, Fincher divides the film into distinct segments: “Chapter 1: Paris/The Target (patient setup), Chapter 2: Dominican Republic/The Hideout (revenge), Chapter 3: New Orleans/The Lawyer (gruesome), Chapter 4: Florida/The Brute (action-packed), Chapter 5: New York/The Expert (Tilda Swinton existentialism) and Chapter 6: Chicago/The Client” (conclusion). While HBO’s “Barry” (2018-2023) started as a laugh-out loud comedy before plunging Bill Hader into darkness, “The Killer” is the opposite, starting out serious before finding a few comic surprises along the way. It’s the sort of data-driven dialogue that Jack Lemmon spun into comedy gold in “The Apartment” (1960) with Fincher giving a slight nod to Lemmon by making The Killer’s alias “Felix Unger.” Michael Fassbender taps into the robotic dialogue he delivered as the Android in “Prometheus” (2012), only this time reading cold voice-over narration filled with statistics on death rates, baseball batting averages and the number of McDonald’s in France. While “The Killer” is indeed written by “Se7en” scribe Andrew Kevin Walker, it is instead a slowburn action thriller told from the perspective of the killer - a coldblooded professional assassin who patiently waits for his kill shot, only for the hit job to go terribly wrong, sending him on the run in an international search. When I first heard that the prolific David Fincher was making a new movie called “The Killer,” I naturally thought it would be about detectives tracking a serial killer, which has been his auteur staple in crime masterpieces from “Se7en” (1995) to “Zodiac” (2007), not to mention TV’s “Mindhunter” (2017-2019). Time for a double movie review: ‘The Killer’ Still, I think one is a little more worth your time than the other, so which should you check out first? Turns out, both are pretty solid watches for most of their runtimes, but both leave us with less than stellar finishes that could have been so much more. ![]() Wolfe’s “Rustin” premieres this Friday hoping to enter the Oscar race. 1 movie on Netflix since its premiere last Friday, while George C. ![]()
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