Movie Review: In David Fincher’s ‘The Killer,’ an Assassin Hides in Plain Sight 

This image released by Netflix shows Michael Fassbender as an assassin in a scene from "The Killer." (Netflix via AP)
This image released by Netflix shows Michael Fassbender as an assassin in a scene from "The Killer." (Netflix via AP)
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Movie Review: In David Fincher’s ‘The Killer,’ an Assassin Hides in Plain Sight 

This image released by Netflix shows Michael Fassbender as an assassin in a scene from "The Killer." (Netflix via AP)
This image released by Netflix shows Michael Fassbender as an assassin in a scene from "The Killer." (Netflix via AP)

It’s a noir staple to open with a bit of narration, but once the nameless hit-man protagonist of David Fincher’s “The Killer” starts gabbing, he doesn’t stop.

As Fincher’s assassin (Michael Fassbender) awaits his target from a high, unfinished floor in a Paris building that looks out on the home of his mark, his inner monologue runs with a smooth, affectless monotone. His musings are a mix of professional tips (“Anticipate, don’t improvise”), nihilistic existential observations (“Most people refuse to believe that the great beyond is anything more than a cold, infinite void”) and sincere self-reflections (“I’m not exceptional, I’m just apart”).

That last line is the most telling one. “The Killer” is a terse, minimalist thriller in the cool, cold-hearted tradition of Jean Pierre Melville’s “Le Samouraï.” But while its methodical and solitary assassin acts and moves like cunning killers we’ve seen before, he blends into a modern background. He doesn’t wear a trench coat or fedora; he dresses like a German tourist, with a dopey bucket hat. He shops for tools on Amazon. He picks up supplies at Home Depot. His position in Paris is an unused WeWork space.

In “The Killer,” an agent of death is hiding in plain sight. He’s an assassin for our homogeneous, corporate world operating in the same spaces we all do. He eats McDonalds. He drives a white Avis rental van that’s the exact same as a dozen others in the rental car parking lot. Sameness is his superpower.

That also means that his nihilism is ours, too. “The Killer,” which begins streaming Friday on Netflix, is a thriller where pointlessness isn’t just lurking in the shadows. It’s everywhere, even in a movie plot that grows increasingly resistant to offering the usual genre satisfactions. Fassbender’s hitman, a background actor supreme, is a lethal manifestation of our soulless environment.

In that opening scene, he boasts of having a batting average (1.000, he brags) “better than Ted Williams.” Yet the job goes badly. In the ensuing turmoil, he races to erase his footsteps but not before a dissatisfied client has his girlfriend (Sophie Charlotte) nearly beaten to death at their clandestine Dominican Republic home.

He embarks on a location-hopping mission to eliminate those responsible, an odd twist for an assassin who, at length, preaches disaffection. Much doesn’t quite fit in “The Killer.” That he even has a live-in girlfriend — we barely see her and his thoughts never again turn back to her — seems unlikely. A revenge plot also doesn’t quite suit such a dispassionate protagonist. “Forbid empathy,” he says. And the movie, too, can be withholding of anything like emotion. The most distinct thing about Fassbender’s killer is that, like Patrick Bateman bopped to Huey Lewis and the News, he listens exclusively to the Smiths.

There’s much pleasure to be found in the unnamed hit man’s proficiency, just as there is in Fincher’s cool finesse. Here, the director — long known for his own meticulous rigor — is working with some regular collaborators, among them screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker (“Se7en”), composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (“The Social Network”) and cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt (“Mank”). And there’s a kinetic thrill to seeing Fincher back in B-movie territory. (The script is based on a French graphic novel by Alexis “Matz” Nolent.)

Especially good is a nighttime sequence set in Florida that begins and ends with a bloodthirsty dog and in between features violent hand-to-hand combat that careens through glass and walls. The scene, like several others in “The Killer,” is a filmmaking feat of control. Fassbender, a natural at playing a loner (see “Shame”), is captivating throughout because he so possesses the movie’s chief traits of guile and a deadpan sense of humor.

Everything here is tantalizingly close to calculated perfection that it comes almost as a surprise how “The Killer” ends up missing its mark. You could call it a feature of the film’s existentialism, but “The Killer” increasingly is working, albeit proficiently, in a vacuum. Our hitman travels from place to place — always with fake passports with the names of TV characters like Felix Unger, Lou Grant or Sam Malone — but we don’t get anywhere deeper with him or anything else. Meaningless may be the point in “The Killer,” but at a certain point in this stylishly composed but empty vessel, you feel like pleading as another Fincher protagonist once did: What’s in the box?



Video Game Performers Will Go on Strike Over Artificial Intelligence Concerns 

SAG-AFTRA signage is seen on the side of the headquarters in Los Angeles on Friday, Nov. 10, 2023. (AP)
SAG-AFTRA signage is seen on the side of the headquarters in Los Angeles on Friday, Nov. 10, 2023. (AP)
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Video Game Performers Will Go on Strike Over Artificial Intelligence Concerns 

SAG-AFTRA signage is seen on the side of the headquarters in Los Angeles on Friday, Nov. 10, 2023. (AP)
SAG-AFTRA signage is seen on the side of the headquarters in Los Angeles on Friday, Nov. 10, 2023. (AP)

Hollywood's video game performers announced they would go on strike Thursday, throwing part of the entertainment industry into another work stoppage after talks for a new contract with major game studios broke down over artificial intelligence protections.

The strike — the second for video game voice actors and motion capture performers under the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists — will begin at 12:01 a.m. Friday. The move comes after nearly two years of negotiations with gaming giants, including divisions of Activision, Warner Bros. and Walt Disney Co., over a new interactive media agreement.

SAG-AFTRA negotiators say gains have been made over wages and job safety in the video game contract, but that the two sides remained split over the regulation of generative AI. A spokesperson for the video game producers, Audrey Cooling, said the studios offered AI protections, but SAG-AFTRA’s negotiating committee said that the studios’ definition of who constitutes a "performer" is key to understanding the issue of who would be protected.

"The industry has told us point blank that they do not necessarily consider everyone who is rendering movement performance to be a performer that is covered by the collective bargaining agreement," SAG-AFTRA Chief Contracts Officer Ray Rodriguez said at a news conference Thursday afternoon. He said some physical performances are being treated as "data."

Without guardrails, game companies could train AI to replicate an actor’s voice, or create a digital replica of their likeness without consent or fair compensation, the union said.

"We strike as a matter of last resort. We have given this process absolutely as much time as we responsibly can," Rodriguez told reporters. "We have exhausted the other possibilities, and that is why we’re doing it now."

Cooling said the companies' offer "extends meaningful AI protections."

"We are disappointed the union has chosen to walk away when we are so close to a deal, and we remain prepared to resume negotiations," she said.

Andi Norris, an actor and member of the union's negotiating committee, said that those who do stunt work or creature performances would still be at risk under the game companies' offer.

"The performers who bring their body of work to these games create a whole variety of characters, and all of that work must be covered. Their proposal would carve out anything that doesn’t look and sound identical to me as I sit here, when, in truth, on any given week I am a zombie, I am a soldier, I am a zombie soldier," Norris said. "We cannot and will not accept that a stunt or movement performer giving a full performance on stage next to a voice actor isn’t a performer."

The global video game industry generates well over $100 billion dollars in profit annually, according to game market forecaster Newzoo. The people who design and bring those games to life are the driving force behind that success, SAG-AFTRA said.

Members voted overwhelmingly last year to give leadership the authority to strike. Concerns about how movie studios will use AI helped fuel last year’s film and television strikes by the union, which lasted four months.

The last interactive contract, which expired in November 2022, did not provide protections around AI but secured a bonus compensation structure for voice actors and performance capture artists after an 11-month strike that began in October 2016. That work stoppage marked the first major labor action from SAG-AFTRA following the merger of Hollywood’s two largest actors unions in 2012.

The video game agreement covers more than 2,500 "off-camera (voiceover) performers, on-camera (motion capture, stunt) performers, stunt coordinators, singers, dancers, puppeteers, and background performers," according to the union.

Amid the tense interactive negotiations, SAG-AFTRA created a separate contract in February that covered independent and lower-budget video game projects. The tiered-budget independent interactive media agreement contains some of the protections on AI that video game industry titans have rejected. Games signed to an interim interactive media agreement, tiered-budget independent interactive agreement or interim interactive localization agreement are not part of the strike, the union said.