The Killer film review with Michael Fassbender te

I sound like a broken record here every week when I talk about how films respond to late capitalism, but here we go it’s inevitable that we’ll return to it in the new thriller David Fincher. The killer It would just be a traditional hit man thriller if it wasn’t so willing to actually deal with the precariousness of work.

Michael Fassbender plays the murderer and, in the role of the narrator of his own story, communicates with the viewer much more often offscreen than with the other characters in the film. We quickly realize that the murderer’s text in which he introduces us to the philosophy and values ​​behind his systematic routine is less about convincing us and more about convincing himself. In The Killer, perfectionism is not a contextless eccentricity but a symptom of a neoliberal enthusiasm for productivity.

Here it is important to emphasize that the film deals with sociocultural and economic issues in order to dispel the first impression that “The Killer” is just a formal exercise in this film, which Fincher supports Netflix with a touch of pastime. The director imitates it Jean Pierre Melville and The Samurai (1967) from the protagonist’s costume to the poster art, and Melville was a master of the supposedly alienated crime film. The creation of this kinship is part of an operation aimed at disguising the Assassin’s speech as cheap entertainment.

From a creative perspective, there isn’t much risk in this process, as Fincher is using Netflix’s support to flex old muscles; especially those from Fight Club (1999), in which Edward Norton He also proves to be an unreliable narrator in his sophisms about consumerism, selfhelp and everything that is out there. The fact that The Killer reunites Fincher with the screenwriter of Seven (1995), Andrew Kevin Walkeralmost 30 years later, seems in keeping with that ’90s rescue, and what’s more, The Assassin also taps into the approach to misogyny that characterizes the director’s thrillers.

The question then is how to update “The Killer” and its countercultural commentary for the 2020s, and whether this elevates the film beyond its proof of literalism. On the one hand, it is obviously an aerobic game, about the challenge of creating a thriller with few dialogues and an almost musical cadence, supported by the omnipresent soundtrack of Trent Reznor It is Atticus Ross. On the other hand, ironically, the facilities of late capitalism make the professional killer’s revenge mission utterly boring, from purchasing a card cloner on Amazon to easily getting into a highend gym thanks to a free weeklong pass.

It is from this friction between challenge and boredom that the film draws its discursive strength, or at least its greatest internal conflict. The tediousness of the meticulous, formalistic approach is also a central element of the thrillers he directs Steven Soderbergh over the last 15 years, and never has Fincher been as close to his American contemporary as in The Killer. The entire scene in which Fassbender travels through Florida in the film is reminiscent of Soderbergh’s The Proof (2011): the frenzy of blows and destruction, the impact of which is heightened by its groundlessness, the action as a purely mechanized affair.

In The Killer, boredom creates a perception that accompanies the viewer from the moment Fassbender turns the WeWork doorknob: being the narrator of his own story does not make him any less a service provider in a grand scheme of impersonality. Plaything of the outsourced trade, with the added bonus that there are no unhealthy conditions in the world of killers (or at least PJs in general). Obviously this is the crux of the film, as the voiceover narration in the final minutes highlights, but it’s interesting to watch as Fincher and Walker attempt to create a narrative based on the premise that the protagonist has everything is given within reach of an approach to the credit card and nothing stands in the way.

This pessimism about our horizons and the indifference with which the film treats the character’s relationship to the world make “The Assassin” another of Fincher’s explorations of the theme of cynicism. At the beginning of his narrative, Fassbender comes forward and defends himself by saying that people confuse skepticism with cynicism, but it is worth remembering that the protagonist’s point of view is not the most reliable. The fact is that The Killer becomes more cynical by the minute, and by the end, when the sunlight hits the character’s face and supposedly redeems him, the dawn may actually be just another glimpse of the end of the world, as in the explosion from the end of Fight Club.