Review Tales

“Fincher has that Kubrick thing where he can’t unsee what he sees……. I think for people like that, it’s almost like a gift and curse, because they can’t unsee what they see. And that’s the ‘genius’, right?!”

Matt Damon here narrating his experience visiting his buddy Ben Affleck on the Gone Girl set. When Damon sat behind Fincher’s director chair, he observed a background actor walking into frame with one of the Rosamund Pike/Affleck scenes – but Fincher is seething at how odd the extra walks! Even as Pike and Affleck are killing it with the scene, all Fincher is rambling about is how unnatural this poor background actor was walking! It probably felt to Fincher like a red wine stain on a white shirt!

During a promo for Full Metal Jacket, Dorian Harewood said in a complementary manner that Kubrick was a perfectionist – and then Kubrick all the way in England sees this interview and calls Harewood over the phone screaming “I’M NOT A PERFECTIONIST! WHY DID YOU SAY I’M A PERFECTIONIST!” Harewood laughing replies “But you ARE a perfectionist, Stanley! What do you think all those takes are?” Fincher too has on many occasions rolled his eyes whenever questions about his ‘many takes’ comes up. Maybe guys like Kubrick and Fincher aren’t just making meticulous takes coz they’re chasing perfection, maybe it’s just as Damon puts it: they cannot unsee what they see…..an itch they cannot scratch…..an incurable stubbornness to fixate on stupid details!

I haven’t read the source material, but The Killer embodies Fincher’s logos: a high functioning professional (ADHD, OCD, Autistic, pick your pick) who excels ridiculously at his job, until he cannot escape an error outside of his control. We see ‘the killer’ be precise in every detail, but completely miss that he is acting at the highest level against his code. Then we see him eliminate every person along the chain just doing a job… then let the guy at the top go. I think the entire point of the movie is how invested in the details one can become that he loses sight of the important top level decisions. Look at your social media timelines: aren’t we just running around now distracted by the issue of the week, while forgetting about every top level scandal in our current world?!

Michael Fassbender can thank Fincher for rewriting his filmography. He will no longer have 2016’s ungodly Assassins Creed adaptation as the only film where he plays the leading hitman! The Killer is an action film moreso than a thriller, where the protagonist is a bad person that somehow at a certain level is interesting enough that we follow him to see how far he’ll go to accomplish his mission. In a sense, the film has elements of a very dark comedy also extremely well executed film and greatly directed although the main character is not a role model for the audience – it only hit me that the fake aliases ‘the killer’ uses are the names of sitcom characters!

Or maybe ‘the killer’ is a non-psychopath trying to be psychopathic to do a psychopath’s job. Why else would he keeps repeating his mantras about following procedure……followed by him messing up each time! And thats why the film’s interesting. Tilda Swinton’s character shows the audience what an actual psychopath is. If I were to truly fault the film, it’s that Swinton vs Fassbender woulda worked better as the denouement rather than getting to the climax! Her poking holes at his practiced resolve; her teasing him that he deep down enjoys killing; her absurd ‘sodomizing bear’ analogy; all while desperately bargaining to save her own life like a cornered wildcat! It’s seriously up there with De Niro/Pacino coffee scene and of course Batman/Joker interrogation scene, and nothing ever quite tops that encounter as the story wraps up!

‘The killer’ is at the very least a sociopath, but cares enough for someone else to realize he has empathy, so he needs to constantly remind himself so that it can’t interfere in his line of work if he wants to succeed. I think Fincher’s decision to limit how much we see ‘the killer’s home life reflects how internally messy the character is. He’s really out for revenge to make up for his humiliating mistake at the beginning — essentially combusting from the inside out as the “well-oiled killing machine” he’s attempted to maintain is falling apart and he refuses to accept it. If we wanted to feel the Killer’s urge to exact vengence, Fincher would’ve expanded on the killer’s love life or some other emotional crutch for the audience to get behind. But the movie’s more about an assassin trying to prove himself, mislead himself, trick himself into believing his ideal mantras. It’s a slice of life of an assassin, on a particular timespan where we focus on his killer instincts over his humane instincts!

There’s a fight scene between our titular antihero and a ‘brute’ that may very well be this decade’s version of the Eastern Promises sauna scene: just a seemingly never-ending ugly street brawl to the death in one interior location where the entire surrounding’s a potential weapon to end the other guy, shot by a director who wants you to feel and hear every bone break! I thought Tenet’s inverted protagonist fight scene was gonna define the 2020s, but this might be more jawdropping if I’m being honest! Is is just coincidence Fincher and Nolan made divisive globe-trotting action movies this decade centering around a blank slate of a nameless main character, with not much emotion for the starving audience to latch onto?! When in fact it was both directors having a laugh at the ‘self-serious’ image their critics have of them; both directors letting lose with their storytelling tendencies……perhaps to an alienating extent lol! John David Washington and Michael Fassbender using cheese graters in their respective fight scenes is a trend I wanna see in more flicks! 

I would like to think the people who didn’t click with this film wanted Fincher to lean more to the painfully intricate Zodiac or the moral musings of Se7en….or still bitter about Mindhunter cancellation. I don’t care whether you call this “low-tier” Fincher or not, I wanted a movie I could point my finger at and say this is how you should adapt a Hitman Codename 47 videogame into a movie. I got exactly what I wanted – just like the Metal Gear Solid vibes I got from Tenet!