The Killer (2023) Review

David Fincher had wanted to adapt Matz and Luc Jacamon's French graphic novels since 2007, and brought the project to Netflix, where he has an overall deal, with Andrew Kevin Walker, who wrote Se7en, on the script. Michael Fassbender's unnamed assassin talks us through his rules in a flat, superior voiceover (plan everything, improvise nothing, feel nothing), then misses his target in Paris. The rest follows him from the Dominican Republic to New Orleans, Florida, upstate New York and Chicago, settling accounts.

The joke, and it is deliberate, is the gap between the monologue and the man: he is fussy, fallible, far less in control than he claims, and he listens exclusively to the Smiths. Erik Messerschmidt shoots it with Fincher's cold exactness, a fight in a dark Florida house is brutal and superbly staged, and Tilda Swinton gets the best scene, a whiskey dinner with a fellow professional that plays like a one-act play.

It is also thin. Walker's plot is a straight line and the people on the list barely register. Manohla Dargis found the character and the film boring; Peter Bradshaw called it a horribly addictive samurai procedural. Both have a point, and Fassbender's stillness tips it toward the second.