The Killer (2023) After enduring its interminable two hours, this David Fincher film left me gaping with one simple reaction.....
That's it?? This is what Fincher poured all his considerable talent and effort into?? Ya gotta be shittin' me........
Nobody's denying this movie is slick, stylish, polished to a high sheen and played to perfection by a few charismatic, gifted actors like Michael Fassbender and Tilda Swinton.....
But then again, so were dozens and dozens of other, older films that "The Killer" duplicates.
Just to name a few...."Point Blank" with Lee Marvin, Le Samouri with Alain Delon, Collateral with Tom Cruise, Leon The Professional with Jean Reno........
So what's new in "The Killer"? Did Fincher uncover all sorts of illuminating insights into the mind of a sociopathic assassin that all those other films missed?
Nope. Same old stuff. Cold, cool guy who maintains his distanced aloof attitude toward his chosen field.....maintaining his independence as a freelance hitman for hire.
In its first half hour, the film pounds the Hitman Philosophy into your head until you'll beg for mercy......as espoused in the endless internal monologue of the unnamed title character (Michael Fassbender).
For a quicker, more to-the-point condensed version of the killer's blathering musings, you can just refer to the few succinct lines written for Max Von Sydow's assassin in "Three Days Of The Condor",
When Fassbender's latest hit goes awry, the corporate lizard who hired him needs to clean up loose ends, Fassbender being one of them. This results in grievous injury to the killer's beloved girlfriend parked in his sumptuous Dominican Republic hideaway......
For hitman, that's sets his usual non-existent moral compass a spinnin'......so off he goes to methodically wipe out everyone on the murder-for-hire food chain, right up to the top lizard (Arliss Howard).
At this point, before you drift off to sleep, you'll want to stay awake for a bravura brawl between our killer and the hulking goon who damaged his fair damsel. It's runs comically too long, with Fincher and his stuntmen doing their best to surpass that epic punch-up between Daniel Craig and Dave Bautista in "Spectre".
Then the hit list lights on the killer's fellow colleague, dubbed here "The Expert" played by Tilda Swinton and compared (not without some accuracy) to a Q-tip. In a film mostly devoid of dialogue, Swinton makes the most out of her 'Farewell to me' speech, thereby justifying her presence in the film.......
If Fincher wanted to prove he could craft a film to rival the spiffy, visually dazzling but utterly hollow thrillers of...,say Tony Scott or Michael Mann, then mission accomplished.......
But for a filmmaker famous for swinging for the fences, what a tiresome, uninteresting mission to pursue......2 stars (**)>
No comments:
Post a Comment