By Sandra Hall
THE KILLER
MA, 118 minutes. Selected cinemas
★★★★
The Killer is a professional hitman with a fetish for the statistics of his trade and firm ideas about methods of camouflage. His habitual outfit is inspired by his observations of German tourists at leisure. Except for the Hawaiian shirt, he’s a study in beige. Moving through the world between hits, he looks as if he’s on a perpetual golfing holiday.
He’s played by Michael Fassbender, whose brand of handsomeness has a symmetry that lends itself to anonymity. It’s easy to disguise, and he wears a neutral expression very plausibly, a talent that proves useful, for the Killer is a character who prides himself on pragmatism, objectivity and avoiding empathy. He doesn’t care whom he kills or why. It’s all about the pay cheque.
Michael Fassbender’s hitman blends in by being bland.Credit:
All this makes him perfect fodder for director David Fincher, who has a penchant for characters out of synch with the natural order of things. There’s a strong strain of the perverse running through his work, a fascination with the sinister lurking behind the everyday.
The film is an adaptation of a French graphic novel by Matz Nolent and illustrator Luc Jacamon scripted by Andrew Kevin Walker, who’s been a regular Fincher collaborator since they first worked together in 1995 on the highly disturbing thriller Seven.
This script conjures up a similar atmosphere of unease although the moments of bleakly sardonic humour underlying the violence are new and probably owe a lot to the deadpan matter-of-factness of the comic book.
We first meet the killer in Paris as he’s preparing for a hit that’s about to go disastrously wrong. When it does, he’s astonished, a rare experience for him, and he runs for his life, knowing his employers, who have no patience with failure, will soon be after him.
The plot is spread across a broad and scenic canvas. His next stop is the Dominican Republic where he has a luxurious bolthole in the forest. Rival assassins, however, have got there before him and his girlfriend (Sophie Charlotte) has been so badly beaten that his old rules about pragmatism and objectivity suddenly become irrelevant and his urge for revenge means killing is no longer a job. It’s a mission.
Each of the confrontations that follow is set in a different city and they’re all intricately and often gruesomely choreographed, but the sophistication of the writing, the psychological twists that punctuate the action and the mordant tone all help distract you from the hovering conviction that much of the violence is gratuitous.
The centrepiece, for example, is dinner table exchange between Fassbender and an elegantly ironic Tilda Swinton as an equally experienced assassin. All too aware their conversation may be the last she ever has with anyone, she treats it like a high-stakes poker game.
It’s a coolly mesmerising scene in a film that is almost as objective as the killer himself, and just as intelligent.
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