David Fincher’s latest film certainly has what it takes to become a cult classic. This slick, cruel, ironic take on the killer movie definitely has it all: a star worth the price of admission (Michael Fassbender, ready to play sexy sociopaths with a shark smile), a conscious desire for fashion (our protagonist hears none other than The Smiths) and a deceptively minimalist premise (Killer botches the hit and is therefore in immediate and present danger).
A famous American director is responsible for this. Zodiac AND Ex-girlfriend Almost aggressively, it avoids the narrative bells and whistles of most violent action films to present a clear, chapter-driven story about a skilled assassin. But this man is not the caped-macho killing machine of film history.
This guy wears bucket hats. And this guy shoots the wrong person.
In voice acting, MurdererFincher’s protagonist (we don’t know his name) expresses the ritualistic tough-guy existentialism found in one of Fincher’s characters. Fight club could get married, but manages to ruin his only job. When his supposedly well-hidden private life is threatened – and someone he loves is put in danger – he takes it upon himself to track down the killers behind him and find the billionaire who hired him in the first place. But nothing is really at stake: this man is a cipher, an empty automaton who believes in his superiority, even though he has proven time and time again that he is not up to the task.
It’s shockingly brutal at times. One particular MMA-style fight against a giant killer is unforgettably brutal and disgusting. Fincher never lets us forget that this is what he’s great at: creating rhythmically clean, detailed, and physically demanding genre films.
But with his other hand he points somewhere else. The film shuttles between exotic locales without much fanfare, showing you only garages and ugly luxury gyms; it tells us that this is ardent revenge, but we do not see passion. In fact, Murderer It’s about the gap between what we’re told and what we see: what does this kill-or-be-killed mentality actually give us? Fincher shows us a man so romantically charged with his peculiarity that he forgets that it’s all nonsense in the first place.
For Fincher, a director known for his fashion statements and penchant for perfectionism much like Fassbender’s character, it could be an exercise in self-deprecation and an anti-capitalist parable. Done with the coldest irony, Murderer perhaps one of his nastiest—and smartest—films to date.