‘The Killer’: The unintentional comedy of the year?

Have you heard the joke about kreplach? A little boy hates this typical Jewish recipe and so his mother shows him how to make it. The ingredients are delicious: a pancake, a meatball, a dumpling... he claps his hands enthusiastically, but when he sees the completed dish he shouts in horror “Aaaaah, kreplach!” Many succulent ingredients do not guarantee a good outcome. We can blend Fincher, Fassbender, Swinton and Arliss Howard — I still long for the airtight and fascinating Rubicon — season it with gripping subject matter such as hired killers, and upon tasting it still be horrified: Aaaaah, The Killer!

Despite Netflix cataloging David Fincher’s new movie as drama, it is a comedy, I imagine unintentionally. It’s hilarious in its casting — in what universe would Michael Fassbender go unnoticed? And it requires too much of a fictional pact: how long would it take for the gendarmerie to be called by the residents of a posh Parisian neighborhood if someone were to spend the night in an office under construction? The internal dialogue of Fassbender’s cryptobro, who reads Marcus Aurelius and thinks about the Roman Empire between CrossFit and Bikram Yoga classes, borders on parody: “Empathy is weakness. Weakness is vulnerability.”

The nihilism that worked so well in Fight Club is ridiculous today, especially in men in their fifties. So are the eternal monologues. It could have been filmed with WhatsApp audios. Everyone delivers their speech, calculates whether it will be enough to be in the running for the best supporting actor Oscar, and then they do nothing else. Note the ridiculous sequence featuring Tilda Swinton at a restaurant table, which is better lit than any other scene, including one in a hospital. The obsession among cinematographers to bump up our diopters is unceasing. As if Fincher hadn’t already proved with the climax of Seven that you can terrorize people in the full light of day. I suspect that with this anodyne offering he is attempting revenge on Netflix for canceling Mindhunter. This is the guy who made The Game after all; nothing is too twisted for him.

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