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The Killer Movie Review

The Killer is a 2023 action thriller film directed by David Fincher and starring Michael Fassbender. It is the director’s worst and only bad movie.

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“Forbid empathy.

Empathy is weakness.

Weakness is vulnerability“

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Solitary, cold and methodical, a killer waits in the shadows, watching for his next target. Yet, the longer he waits, the more he thinks he’s losing his mind. I at least liked if not loved every movie that Fincher has directed before this one, but with The Killer we have his first mediocrity. It’s a film that is so bad that it would have been heavily criticized had it been directed by anyone other than Fincher.

The Killer simply doesn’t work. It is the type of picture that doesn’t function as a sophisticated psychological exploration of a serial killer nor is it the type of movie that serves visceral genre thrills. It doesn’t give you anything of substance and it’s not fun enough to be at least an entertaining action thriller flick. Never at once was I entertained or did I ever feel any sort of intensity as the film’s extremely sluggish pacing is very off-putting.

It’s good to see Michael Fassbender again after he took a break from acting for more than a couple of years now. Yes, he was obviously typecast here as he was always best suited to play sociopathic villains, but he nonetheless delivered a memorable performance and he’s quite menacing in the role.

My issue here is that all the other characters are just there to serve as killer fodder for him, even including Tilda Swinton herself. It was so disappointing to witness an actress of her caliber be reduced to a role where she just gets to be killed off. To be fair, she got that one moment where she told an interesting story and that story was the only memorable and more meaningful part of the movie, but even that scene was fleeting.

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Most of this film consists of Fassbender’s character preparing to execute his perfect kill and all the while giving us his thoughts about everything. None of these inner monologues were at all observant, sophisticated or intriguing. In fact, they were horribly miscalculated and plain annoying. This type of monologuing and a cold main character that prepares and then kills people without remorse can only be “cool” to very young males and nobody else.

The Killer is technically polished. Yes, it’s a limited in scope movie, but how each location was utilized for memorable action set pieces was great and so was the excellent cinematography and a solid score. The acting is again terrific too and the directing from the technical standpoint was also superb. I just wished that the action scenes were better handled. They were fun and well shot, but there is that one prolonged fight scene that was ludicrous how unbelievable and dumb it was in its every moment.

But that’s where my praise for this overrated bore would end as Fincher failed to imbue this overly simplistic story with any messaging, interesting observations or purpose whatsoever. There is a definite lack of ideas that pervaded this movie from start to finish. Fincher must have done this movie very quickly as he could do this thing in his sleep, which is why he shouldn’t be praised for doing an inferior version of all of his previous infinitely better thrillers.

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And that is where my biggest problem with this movie and its proponents lies. The critics would basically go out of their way to praise any film that was directed by a big name director, even including their worst efforts. Reading the reviews on this movie, I got the idea that the critics were being huge hypocrites and that they would be bashing it had it been directed by a lesser known director, and this type of practice needs to stop if we want objectivity and fairness in our film criticism.