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Did anyone see David Fincher’s the Killer? Thoughts?
Not offensively bad, but not worth seeing either. Didn't do anything for me, other than kill two hours.
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It it's intended to be a straightforward action/suspense movie, then it's not very good.
If it's intended to take the piss out of such movies, it's better. It's basically a John Wick type of story, but all elements being sufficiently shitty so as to just be above blatant parody. For example, there is a narration throughout the movie where the protagonist justifies his actions and puffs himself up with a sort of sophomoric "cool assassin guy" / "nothing personnel kid" persona (he literally calls civilians normies) as well making mildly unfunny quips. It's long unclear if it's just shitty writing; but in one scene his monologue is abruptly interrupted when somebody talks over him, so it becomes obvious that it's his actual internal monologue and just him being a blowhard. It just never actually blatantly winks at the audience, so you'll have to realize this yourself. (Another thing that points to this is that he constantly fucks up, especially when doing "cool ruthless assassin" things; like when he shoots nails in a guys chest during an interrogation and has an internal monologue calculating how slowly he'll die, but none of that works and he just dies instantly instead.)
Similar things are going on with the plot and character motivations; he wants to kill the people responsible for assaulting his wife (who is given the minimal amount of screen time to establish a motivation for the protagonist, and then is basically never thought of again). He leaves a pile of dead people in the wake, executing even innocent people without mercy to not leave evidence, but then in the end when he meets the big boss responsible for everything the guy gives him a piss-weak excuse of having no idea what is going on, and the protagonist just buys it instantly and lets him go.
I keep seeing this take in discussions, and I just don't get it.
Yes, the killer messes up in the beginning and he makes a few mistakes throughout the film (shooting the nails into the guy, getting caught in the Florida house, snagging the janitor's key). But the killer ultimately succeeds in everything. He kills everyone he wants to kill. He doesn't die or get caught or get grievously injured. And he repeatedly shows cold blooded efficiency, like when he killed Tilda Swinton or the Florida guy. Based on his wealth and reputation, he has probably successfully pulled off dozens of assassinations in the past.
So the killer is not a try-hard buffoon. He really is an expert assassin, but as he admits in the opening monologue, he isn't a genius, so he makes some mistakes along the way.
As for the ending, I think the textual read is that assassinating a billionaire would bring too much police attention and risk, so better just to threaten the guy. I'm guessing there is also some sort of subtext about the billionaire boss surviving while his contractor/employees all died, hence the killer monologuing that he's now part of the masses being exploited by the few, rather than vice versa.
I read a lot of reddit takes in the /r/movies review thread. I think you've kind of distilled it down.
The Killer is mostly a highly competent assassin. I think the point of the movie is that he is human and fallible. He keeps repeating his mantra while he breaks his own rules and that is kind of the point. He keeps fucking up, which isn't just because he's incompetent.
I think the movie shows a relatively realistic view of what a professional killer would be and how that would work in a world where humans are humans. The other killers fuck up more than the 'protagonist' did. Tilda Swinton's character should never have accepted a job with The Brute and it arguably led to her death.
The Lawyer had this arrogant professional attitude like 'You idiot why did you actually trust me? You know how the game is played' and treats the Killer with contempt, even as it led to his death. Fincher did well in that the movie with a 'What happens when people try to pretend that they are more perfect/professional than they are?' experiment.
Besides the meta-narrative, I really enjoyed the concept of what a hitman would actually look like in real life. I can't imagine someone doing much differently in a professional assassination role outside of the Spec Ops world. Many people in the reddit thread thought it boring and mundane, but I love the detail and the flaws in the methodology. It reminds me of a book series by Andy McNab (an ex SAS author) who talks about all sorts of mundanity like going to Target and buying a few changes of underwear before going on a stakeout, and how the protagonist fucks up even as he thinks he's done nothing wrong.
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Completely predictable (including that Tilda Swinton was the best thing in it). No particularly interesting characters. And,why does an organization that employs assassins have their home addresses on file? Do they send them W-2s?
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Fincher is a master technician and I respect the film for what it is... but the sum of its parts is very "meh." It's just not interesting. I didn't care about any of the characters, I didn't care about the plot, and maybe 60% of the film literally consists of watching Fassbender do ordinary boring shit like pick up rental cars and buy stuff off Amazon. I was never quite bored, but I was never really into it either. Yet again, I really wish Fincher would apply his amazing filmmaking skills to more interesting material. But at least the mid-movie fight scene was amazing.
6/10
I kept asking myself why the big mountain of muscle kept throwing his disarmed and physically weaker opponent away from him where he ended up repeatedly grabbing improvised weapons, instead of just grabbing him and choking/beating him to death in a more controlled fashion.
Armchair MMA, I guess.
This is one of those movie tropes that I've come to just depressingly accept at this point. Maybe action movies have always relied on this as a get-out-of-jail-free card to deal with situations when the hero needs to fight someone clearly much bigger and stronger than them, but I've certainly noticed it a lot more over the past decade or so. The generally well-received episode of Game of Thrones, Hardhome, was basically completely ruined for me because of this trope where Jon Snow should've been killed ten times over before his dramatic discovery of the effects of Valyrian steel on White Walkers. It sure would be nice of scriptwriters and action choreographers cared about building a fight scene around its combatants and the back and forth of their actions and reactions to each other in the fight instead of around spectacle and plot convenience, but the latter is much easier, I'm sure.
Hell, I was thinking the same thing watching Thor throw around Iron Man in Duplex’s example. His most effective move was literally just squeezing.
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