The Killer (2023)

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Rated R for a dude murdering folks not-like it's his business.  It is his business.  But then it also spirals into revenge killing for the entire movie.  A lot of the murder is especially brutal because it is so matter-of-fact.  With that, there is some language.  There's also some sexuality that doesn't have explicit nudity, but it is there enough that I feel like I should  comment on it.  R.

DIRECTOR:  David Fincher

Guys, I'm probably taking a break after this.  I got through the Academy Awards.  I've been writing so so so so so so much and I kind of...um...need a moment for me.  But I'm glad I get to kind of dismount on a movie that a lot of people were "meh" about, but I really dug.  There's something special liking a movie that everyone else was meh about.  Sure, I'm going to get frustrated  at parties when I bring up this movie.  But the joke's on them!  I don't get invited to parties!

The glorious thing about this movie is that it gave me back Fight Club.  I'm going to be old for a minute, so please bear with me.  Fight Club was a great movie.  It was amazing.  It was life-changing.  But you know who else thought so?  Everybody else.  Not just everybody else.  The Mountain Dew generation fell in love with this movie and wouldn't shut up about it.  Then, they all took it a step further and started having fight clubs.  (Okay, not all of them.  But there were some!) You know that was the opposite message from the movie.  So I watched Fight Club a bunch of times and thought it was super cool.  But then it became everyone's favorite movie.  I'll point out my weaknesses when I have them.  I definitely have them when it comes to everyone talking about the same movie.  Honestly, there are some fandoms that accentuate the source and some fandoms that make it way worse.  Fight Club fans, Dark Knight fans, and Rick and Morty fans?  They make things so rough.

But it feels like The Killer is a movie almost directly aimed at me.  It's for people who have grown too old for Fight Club.  They are people who still want that cool, counter-culture vibe to their stories while simultaneously acknowledging that late-stage Capitalism is probably toxic as can be.  The Killer screams cool.  I know a lot of people are criticizing it for being boring. It's mainly because, despite having action in the movie, it is not an action movie.  There's a long time where we just have a guy externally doing mundane things while thinking about the proper way to kill someone.  Yeah, there's a bit of try-hard (or as Gen Z says, "Pick Me Energy) energy to the movie.  I don't deny that. But that's kind of Fincher's thing.  There's a voiceover and that voiceover is both sadistic and charming at the same time.  I mean, both the Killer and Jack lack names.  ("I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.") And they almost have a lackadaisical attitude to some pretty heavy things.  Maybe that's what makes the narration so charming.  There's rarely an adrenaline fueled moment.  When things go bad, they keep their cool.

What's interesting is that, as much as this character is motivated by having a sense of control in an uncontrollable world, he kind of sucks at maintaining control.  One of the recurring bits of narration is The Killer stressing the importance of adaptation, not improvisation.  (I'm now not quite sure that is the quote, but I've come too far now!) Yet, much of the movie is having the character think on his feet. The entire point of the story is almost the importance of abandoning a set of comfort zones.  When the Killer does everything right, he still fails to kill his target.  When he does things wrong, he takes out Florida Man (who is way more terrifying than I ever thought Florida Man could be).  If anything, the entire film is about embracing chaos.  Sure, there are moments when his killer's training actually pays off for the positive.  When he's leading the Expert to her death, she pulls the old betrayal bit. This might be the first time in any story where I see that bit completely fail because the protagonist never really gives it a chance to play out.  I found it satisfying, is all I'm saying.

But it is hard to write of this as a perfect movie.  I mean, I really enjoyed it.  I think I've made that abundantly clear.  But there were two things that kind of got under my craw.  There's almost no story here.  Honestly.  I don't hate that the last target on the Killer's list was spared.  It almost doesn't make sense, but I felt like it made sense to the character, so I'm going to let it slide.  No, I'm talking about, once the inciting incident happens (the failure to kill the target), everything else is just checking off a list of murders.  Now, I'm going to apologize a little bit at the same time.  This is a movie about a character and that character doesn't necessarily grow.  Instead, we use the character to learn something about the non-traditional.  Yeah, it's a cop out considering that I really need my characters to learn something from the events of the film. But The Killer is meant to give an insight into a much larger world. 

The second thing to bother me is the sitcom names.  Supernatural did this as well.  They tended to replace their own identity with those of musicians, but it was a funny gag.  It's just that one of the repeating motifs of the film is professionalism.  The Killer lives the life of a Spartan.  Everything is built to make him the ultimate assassin.  The one thing that he has that is personal is his home and his wife.  It's implied that it's his wife, so go from there.  But there is no enjoyment of the money he receives. One of my favorite lines in the movie is that he has more money than he can actually spend.  He prides himself in his work.  So this cutsey "Archibald Bunker" stuff almost pulls me out of the movie.  I mean, yeah, that kind of stuff worked in Fight Club.  There were cutesy little moments in there to juxtapose the sheer bleakness of the movie.  But if this is a story about how seriously you take the craft, it plants a weird headcanon in my brain.  That weird headcanon?  I'm glad you asked.

Part of me thinks that this is all imagined.  It's that same level of headcanon that comes with Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Ferris not existing.  (For those not in the know, there are some people who think that Ferris is just a manifestation of Cameron's desire for independence and rebellion.) Part of me thinks that The Killer is all made up, the fantasy of a nobody.  I hate to pull the American Psycho element into this, but part of my brain leeches onto this.  (I mean, I want the movie to be about a trained soulless assassin who isn't to be messed with.  That's my ideal world.)  The sitcom stuff is a big vulnerability for this killer.  All it would take would be one person to be a pop culture savant, like the audience, and they would look at his face.  One of the key ideas behind the story is that he has to be as forgettable as possible.  But then he names himself names like Richard Cunningham or Lou Grant, someone's going to tie the face to a name. The first thing I would do would be to look that person in the face and potentially comment on their name.

Also, considering that he lives by this intense bushido code, how come everything constantly goes poorly for him?  You would think that this killer would be really good at his job. But we never really witness much go right.  Okay, The Expert goes right.  But was he always going to let that guy go at the end?  He repeats the notion of compassion being a weak spot, and lets the guy go.  Here's me coming to grips with something I don't want to admit is a weakness.  I really like that he doesn't kill Claybourne.  It doesn't make a lick of sense, but I think it's a far better than just assassinating him.  Maybe it's just because of the change-up of the norm.  But honestly, it doesn't make sense.  He kills the cab driver, who is way more sympathetic than Claybourne.  If anything, Claybourne comes across as the most deserving of the hit.  But I just...liked it? I don't know.  It's silly.

But this movie kind of slaps.  Maybe it was because it just fell off the radar and was considered one of Fincher's lesser movies that I liked it so much.  There's barely a story.  It's just cool character.  I should hate this...

​...but I don't.