After a swift opening credits montage accompanied by electronic beats, a focused man looks out of a window and lists a series of mantras, throwing a few autistically precise numerical facts out there for the audience to chew. My immediate thoughts went to the opening scene in Drive, even though the guy here is talking in a monologue rather than out loud.
But then the guy keeps on talking. And talking. Stop that, guy. I like my silent heroes or killers to be silent. Or relatively silent. Taciturn, at least. But no, then he has to go on to some expository dialogue about his motivations for killing. NO. Leave the mystery, dude. You’re ruining it. Then you start going on about why you like listening to music? STOP IT. Oof. First scene and already so much expository dialogue that the intrigue has diminished.
Long story short, Michael Fassbender plays a guy who fails a job and goes on a revenge mission to take all the individuals responsible after his wife is attacked instead of him. Fassbander himself hardly says much, preferring to listen to his victim’s pleading before getting the job done, but his constant ‘tough guy’ voiceover really grinds my gears. Sure, Fassbander looks vaguely intimidating as he goes around dishing out vengeance Liam Neeson-style, but it’s hard to feel anything when he’s already laid out his modus operandi in the opening sequence. It’s difficult to feel any empathy when we have no idea about motivation, not helped by the fact that his wife/girlfriend is just inserted in the plot as a two-dimensional damsel in distress.
Zodiac was a stone cold classic largely due to the dynamic between RDJ, Gyllenhaal and Ruffalo and the slow building sense of dread and tension, whereas The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo remains one of the finest American adaptions of a foreign film because of its brilliant balance of action and drama. And those Fincher flicks had pretty killer soundtracks to boot. But it’s really difficult to get behind The Killer here when Fassbender emotes primarily through various Smiths songs, and when all his adversaries are similarly underwritten and hard to get anything from. Fassbender himself does a decent acting job of stony faces, but it isn’t quite enough to make The Killer properly kill it in the quality department. Less killer, more filler, if you catch my drift.