The Killer, the new film by David Fincher, is not based on a particularly original plot. Stories of hitmen whose heads were put at a price by a mysterious client before embarking on a vendetta, we have seen this dozens of times in the cinema.
Free adaptation of the French graphic novel The Killer, by Alexis Nolent and Luc Jacamon, The Killer shines more with its staging. The filmmaker of Zodiac and Seven has a very elegant and effective way of bringing this violent and tense story to the screen, playing with the traditional codes of crime fiction.
Fincher creates a very particular cozy atmosphere, to which the music of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross is no stranger. Andrew Kevin Walker’s screenplay distils irresistible humor, courtesy of the pseudophilosophical mantras and pearls of wisdom of motivational gurus that the killer repeats constantly, during often hilarious interior monologues.
Michael Fassbender embodies with all his talent and aplomb this methodical, conscientious and unscrupulous elite killer, hired at a high price to kill in cold blood. His banal routine, usually carefully regulated, is disrupted by an error of a few millimeters in the trajectory of a stray bullet one evening in Paris.
So begins a hunt in six chapters and an epilogue, from Paris to Chicago via New York, New Orleans and the Dominican Republic. The paranoid killer, who is never named, constantly changes his identity, which is the pretext for jokes about American popular culture.
Among the aliases of this being who is both cynical and pragmatic, conscientious and I don’t care, there is for example Lou Grant, a character from the Mary Tyler Moore Show, George Jefferson, from the series All in the Family, or even Sam Malone who, as in Cheers, holds a Massachusetts driver’s license…
So that his heart rate does not race too much, despite the stress linked to his schedule and the extreme precision required by his professional setting, the killer listens exclusively to Smiths songs. Another comic eccentricity which confirms that in this Killer, David Fincher does not take himself too seriously. This is what makes it so charming.
