After Mank already labeled exclusive Netflix, David Fincher returns to the controls of a new feature film, The Killer, also intended for the American platform. If he doesn't find the way to the theaters, does he offer us at least one big film? Answer below, in a critique shot at close range...
Window on court?
An unnamed antihero (Michael Fassbender) works as a hit man, but he's about to face his first failed mission. A rataign synonymous with the settlement of muscular accounts, including his wife (Sophie Charlotte) is the main victim... He then followed a route of revenge that pushed the character incarnated by Fassbender across the globe, during a story that was capitulated for almost two hours.
The Killer opens on a common field-counterfield dance between a Fassbender as a predator ambushed in the shell of an empty apartment, and a facade of a Parisian building where his future victim resides. Of course Hitchcockien, this passage is simmering thanks to the particularly clever sound-design of an alternation between objective camera and subjective camera that plunges us into the torpor of waiting. Rhythmed by a few metronomic bursts – amusingly in the face of a decidedly unpunished couple, the ballet of passers-by, the regular beep of a watch indicating its pulses... – the opening could have been brilliant if it had not been crushed by the voice-off of its existential hero with the sauce Fight Club, wandering between rabid mantras and philosophic sentences with two bullets, too stupid to be taken seriously, too flat to support any comic spring.
Like a pre-seen impression...
Thus, far from trusting his staging to hold his spectator, Fincher will feel obliged to fill the slightest emptiness by this overwhelming, repetitive and hollow voice-off, thus liming the film what could have made his salt: the weight of waiting, the silent stress of the minutes preceding the shot, the internal methodism of a killing machine whose precision rifle seems to be only a metallic extension of its own members.
At the time of the growing threat of generative AI, The Killer seems to be the result of one of these devitalised prompts – necrotic? – which we serve Midjourney et al.: a film that carries all the seeds of Fincher's cinema as as much as the oripeaux imposed by the marketing services of a capitalism that he believes he will criticize (we will come back to it), sporulating in the end as a long film-macchabee, sick, slow and conformist. And if the main character of The Killer repeats once again that« He doesn't give a shit anymore », we are not far from thinking that it is Fincher himself who applies this mantra to his own films, now that the Logre Netflix condemns them to a domestic broadcast rather than to the screenwriter.
Knee pain
So of course we don't lie, the father of Seven and most recent Gone Girl Neither did he become a manchot in the meantime. Photography is not disgusting – even if it never rises to the level of the good thrillers of the year, Misanthropist in mind – and the millimetered montage does its effect, especially during a resounding fighting scene, briefly leaving the spectator from the torpor in which the film had plunged. But we expected more from Fincher, much more... Especially since his postulate based on obsessive, existentialist heroes, wandering on the tentacles of a globalized world had enough to excite...
Besides, if the anonymization of his hero brings a fun running-ga At every airport check-in, it is hard to see the criticism of this latent capitalism between the lines of The Killer, even by folding the eyelids loudly. Worse, away from skillful spades Fight Club or terrifying paint of The Social Network, Fincher seems to be hiding here in his scholia of many investments of particularly bald products... The one who parasitized the system from inside seems to be made phagocytized by the same model that he was exploding at the time.
In short, it would be dishonest to say that The Killer shameful. It is just as rude to market it as "the best action film of the year" (as can be read on many recent reviews-promo), as it is absolutely nothing of all this. A lukewarm Fincher, perhaps the most banal film of his career, who quickly breaths away to give birth only to a deceitly filmed repeat Revenge movie already seen where there are a few soon forgotten bursts.
A poorly controlled skid, to discover in the cinema for a few lucky and on Netflix from November 10.
[...] work of American cinema, Citizen Kane. Bathed in a superb box of black and white, David Fincher left for a long, furious talk about the forgotten history of Hollywood in the 1930s. [...]