The new David Fincher movie "The Killer" is an exercise in hard-boiled style. The story, drawn from a French graphic novel, is perfunctory and the peripatetic location-hopping (Paris, New Orleans, the Dominican Republic) is a familiar emblem of action-flick filmmaking. What makes the picture work to the extent that it does are Fincher's virtuoso skills in composition and scene choreography and the coolly charismatic presence of his star, Michael Fassbender.
Fassbender's nameless character is an international assassin who makes his way through the world in forgettable beige clothing ("Avoid being memorable," he tells us in a nonstop voiceover), and carries with him little besides a sniper-scoped hitman rifle (which he assembles and breaks down with all the solid clicks and clacks we've come to expect in the 50 years since Fred Zinnemann highlighted them in "The Day of the Jackal").
The Killer, as we might as well call him, is presumably a top operative in his homicidal trade. But that's about to change. As the story opens, in Paris, we find him set up in a loft space across the way from a luxe hotel in which his latest target is located. The Killer, with cheek pressed to rifle stock, can see this gentleman through a high window, but when he takes his shot — the bullet misses.
This is an instant catastrophe. The Killer races down to the street as sirens wail in the distance and quickly steals a motorcycle. Soon he's on a plane headed for his balmy island hideout in the D.R., where he finds that the woman with whom he lives has been beaten and hospitalized by unknown thugs, clearly in retaliation for his Parisian screw-up. Things have suddenly gotten personal.
The Killer hates this sort of hubbub. ("When was my last quiet drowning?" he wonders.) But he presses on, from one airport to the next, flying economy and flourishing fake passports made out in vintage TV names like Felix Unger and George Jefferson. Along the way he kills a few people, picks up a useful nail gun, and eventually, in New York, has a restaurant faceoff with another top killer (played with spiky flair by Tilda Swinton).
There's not a lot at stake in this story, which is a problem — part of the archetypal setup is that we know nothing about the characters. But this makes it hard to care what they're up to. In the end, it's The Killer's witty asides that keep us feeling charitable about the sketchy plot. Passing through Florida in one scene, our murderous protagonist says, "Where else can you find so many like-minded individuals outside a penitentiary?"
'SATAN WANTS YOU'
The great American "Satanic Panic" of the 1980s was a monument to human lunacy. In "Satan Wants You," a new documentary by Steve J. Adams and Sean Horlor, the origin of this idiotic phenomenon is traced back to a Canadian woman named Michelle Smith, a pioneer in the area of "recovered memories" — a wave of bogus cult-abuse tales cooked up by grown women and their psychotherapists, who found them useful in scoring book deals and TV appearances with such tabloid eminences as Geraldo Rivera, Larry King and Sally Jessy Raphael. Ever elaborating on their stories, they spun out recollections of sexual abuse, torture, forced feces eating, and on and on.
In the documentary, we see Smith and her smiley psychiatrist, Dr. Lawrence Pazder, ranging back over their long relationship — which didn't yield any "recovered memories," we're later told, until Pazder started weighing in on their creation. Together they co-wrote a 1980 book, "Michelle Remembers," which became an enormous success. In it, readers learned that the Devil speaks in rhymes ("But I'll be back, you wait and see/I'll be back to take the world for me") and that the Virgin Mary — who drops by to help out at one point — speaks French. More pertinently, one of the film's many talking heads recalls investigating Michelle's claim that at age five she was handed over to a satanic cult for 14 months — and finding perfectly happy looking photos of her during that period in a school yearbook.
The Satanic Panic led to two other spasms of social madness in the mid-1980s — the infamous McMartin preschool case, which ruined several lives and careers, and the laughable satanic heavy metal music stampede that drew congressional interest thanks to the preposterous Parents Music Resource Center, run by a clueless quartet of wives of well-connected politicians.
It would be nice to assume that all this sort of silliness is behind us. But when the film winds up with fleeting mentions of such contemporary inanities as QAnon and Pizzagate, optimism is hard to muster.
Kurt Loder is the film critic for Reason Online. To find out more about Kurt Loder and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.
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