The Killer

Notionally, David Fincher's The Killer is premised on revenge, with Michael Fassbender's unnamed button man hitting back at the layers of people who have conspired to end his life after he botched an assassination attempt. The difference is in the telling. We don't simply sink into the offbeat, English muffin-discarding routine of this paid murderer; a bored methodology so snappily explained that it is immediately arresting, even when very little is actually taking place. We are instead bombarded with his thoughts. Andrew Kevin Walker's screenplay, adapting Alexis Nolent and Luc Jacamon's braggadocios comic series, leverages the kind of posturing inherent to filmic voice over, tuning the all-knowing device to a frequency that is much more private and protective of the subject's ego than is usual. Fassbender's relentless, repetitive rules are transformed over the course of the piece from a mechanical statement of calculated intent into the failing mantra of a person who is losing grip on their sense of self. This Killer wants to be considered calm and collected but his contrived detachment is tempered by a squirrelly need to distance himself from personal danger while always maintaining a constant, situational control. 

His retaliation then is typified by a neurotic need to remain anonymous and untouchable. Passports, phones and pistols - really any of the expensive products that are used in the service of his day job - are relentlessly junked or discarded after only light use. This wastefulness judged essential, lest these gadgets upset the deliberately bland affect that The Killer's paper personalities strive for. Whether or not this chameleonic approach to his stated identity really benefits the flights in and out of danger is less relevant when judged against the extraordinary risks this character is willing to take when he feels, definitively, like he has the upper hand. Really, his career as a contracted murderer has become subservient to the ways in which he is able to spend his ill-gotten riches. The self-storage units packed with criminal bric-a-brac are his juice; carefully catalogued spoils that prefigure this punitory reaction and go some way to indicating that this war against his former colleagues is one that he has always intended to fight. The Killer takes the hobbyist tendencies of bored, middle-aged men and maps them over a personality that has coalesced around the most efficient means of ravenous consumption. Although his enemies found a cold trail when making their own attempts on his life, by trashing his beach house and putting his tight-lipped girlfriend in hospital, the people who came to kill The Killer performed an even greater outrage: as far as he's concerned, they attacked his possessions.