David Fincher's 'The Killer' Review Thread
Rotten Tomatoes: 88% (16 reviews) with 7.60 in average rating
Metacritic: 77/100 (10 critics)
As with other movies, the scores are set to change as time passes. Meanwhile, I'll post some short reviews on the movie. It's structured like this: quote first, source second. Beware, some contain spoilers.
At several junctions, the killer doesn’t do what many viewers might expect, and that unpredictability persists right to the end, but possibly not in an entirely satisfying way. Let’s just say that morally, The Killer is all over the place, which may alienate some viewers. Others may delight in both the protagonist and the film’s puckish, zero-fucks-given attitude, one that seems entirely, atheistically uninhibited by fear of a punitive deity or higher moral purpose.
-Leslie Felperin, The Hollywood Reporter
This is a thriller of pure surface and style and managed with terrific flair and Fassbender’s careworn, inscrutable face is just right for it.
-Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian: 5/5
As carefully made and, at moments, ingenious as it is, the film never matches that opening sequence for sheer screw-tightening excitement. What the Fassbender character goes on to do, while it certainly holds our attention, starts to seem more and more like heightened but conventional variations on the actions of a whole lot of characters we’ve seen in a lot of other thrillers.
“The Killer” is nothing if not committed to its own one-note bit, an existential nihilism that stays the same even as the protagonist, in a mostly silent Michael Fassbender performance, starts to change. It’s as unfeeling as any Fincher thriller, at once predictable in its simplicity but also strangely daring because of it.
Reuniting the filmmaker with his “Seven” screenwriter, Andrew Kevin Walker, adapting a pulpy genre potboiler with icy crisp precision and deploying near total formal command to question the limits of control, David Fincher’s “The Killer” readily and openly welcomes comparisons to much of the director’s prior filmography. But it is genuinely startling that this chilly hit-man drama feels most like a sideways follow-up to “The Social Network” than anything else.
Much of the pleasure of the film is in procedure: watching someone work diligently and knowledgeably towards a goal that just happens to be murder. But a darkly fun tension emerges between its anti-hero’s internalised principles and how he actually behaves when pressed.
-Robbie Collin, The Telegraph: 4/5
The Killer provides a lurid kind of escapism we haven’t really seen since the ’60s, a suave, cold-blooded but very, very funny kind of savoir-faire that finds the frustrated assassin reflecting on his predicament and wondering, “When was my last nice, quiet drowning?”
It’s a compelling performance in a compelling film – one that’s more than a sleek genre exercise, but is likely to reward repeated viewings, and not just for its directorial hyper-craft.
-Jonathan Romney, Screen Daily
Moving and scarfing protein like a predator (a nice character detail as he deconstructs McMuffins and inhales hard-boiled eggs while driving), he offers no real context to his job. No backstory except the hint of legal academia, no data for his ‘real’ life aside from an injured woman. His very blankness allows us to project meaning onto him and gives one of the filmmaker’s more commercial movies a layer of added nuance. And if you ever wondered what Fincher’s Bond might have looked like, this could be it.
-Jane Crowther, Total Film: 4/5
David Fincher is rarely dull, and “The Killer” cannot take the director’s filmography in that direction, but it won’t push itself toward the top of his work, either. A competently realized crime thriller made by a technical team just as sharply attuned to details as the director at the ship’s helm, the Netflix production is entertaining but a little orthodox. The good news is: while this isn’t the brilliant “Zodiac,” it isn’t the paltry “Mank,” either.
-Rafaela Sales Ross, The Playlist: B–
Fincher knows that we know what he can do when he really gets going, but he denies us that pleasure — the cerebral kind and the more base. The Killer is an experiment in economy whose results are lesser than the effort put in. Calculating efficiency is all well and good, but at least some life is required to make meaning of all of this killing.
Despite premiering in competition at the Venice Film Festival, it's the kind of trifling exercise that Steven Soderbergh knocks out when he fancies trying out a new camera. Fincher has talked about making The Killer for well over a decade, but it still comes across as a relaxed holiday project. Perhaps, after Mank in 2020, he was in the mood to take on something cheaper and easier, so we can only hope that he sets his sights on a major work next time around.
-Nicholas Barber, BBC: 2/5
PLOT
After a fateful near miss, an assassin battles his employers, and himself, on an international manhunt he insists isn't personal.
DIRECTOR
David Fincher
WRITER
Andrew Kevin Walker (based on the French graphic novel series written by Alexis "Matz" Nolent and illustrated by Luc Jacamon)
MUSIC
Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross
CINEMATOGRAPHY
Erik Messerschmidt
EDITOR
Kirk Baxter
RELEASE DATE
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September 3, 2023 (Venice International Film Festival)
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November 10, 2023 (Netflix)
RUNTIME
118 minutes
STARRING
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Michael Fassbender as The Killer
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Arliss Howard
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Charles Parnell
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Kerry O'Malley
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Sala Baker
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Sophie Charlotte
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Tilda Swinton
Submitted September 04, 2023 at 12:31AM by SanderSo47 https://ift.tt/5Fa0lmX
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