The Killer (review)

Today I went to the cinema, which is something I haven't done in quite a while. What tempted me back to the big screen? David Fincher's latest movie, The Killer. Was it worth seeing in a movie theatre? Not really. The action was fine, but would look just as good on a decent TV. Were the performances any good? Oh yes. Michael Fassbender is always great value. He should have been picked to play James Bond -- though admittedly he'd be too interesting an actor for the anodyne superhero that Bond has become. The scene with Tilda Swinton is worth the price of admission. But the plotting. Oh dear. 

I'll talk about it because somebody has to care whether stories make any sense. You must expect spoilers from this point on, OK?

The Killer is a seasoned professional hitman with a string of successful and lucrative assassinations behind him, but he misses a shot on his latest target. Which is inconvenient, as the target is now alerted and it will be a while before there’ll be any chance of a follow-up attempt.

Unknown to the Killer, his handler, Hodges, proposes to the client that he can have the Killer whacked for another 150k. Why kill the golden goose? Don’t know. Why would Hodges think that the Killer would blab after one slip-up? Don’t know. How would the client (just a rich business dude) ever know whether his 150k had actually been spent on rubbing out the Killer? He wouldn't, so why pay?

Hodges hires two other assassins, the Expert and the Brute. It looks like all you need to know is in the names, except (as we will find out) they are fairly useless, which makes it surprising that Hodges is so blasé about writing off his star performer. They also haven’t worked together before, which would be a danger signal in many professions where the stakes are considerably lower than in assassination.

Hodges sends them to the Killer’s isolated jungle home in the Dominican Republic, though he must realize the Killer won’t be back there yet. They find Magdala, the Killer’s girlfriend, and torture her for information. Why doesn’t Hodges just give them this information? Don’t know. Why not wait at the house to ambush the Killer when he comes back? Don’t know.

They leave Magdala alive. Why? Ah, this one I do know – it’s because otherwise the writer couldn’t give the Killer the clues he needs to find the assassins. He tracks them via the taxi company who took them to the house. Why didn’t they hire a car? Why did they leave the taxi driver alive? How did Magda get a look at the taxi from hundreds of yards away through a jungle? You got me.

The Killer now realizes Hodges hired the two assassins. He goes and kills him and gets info about the two assassins from Hodges’ secretary, whom he kills. (Unlike the Expert, he leaves no loose ends.) Meanwhile, you may ask, isn’t he in jeopardy from the Expert and the Brute, who have been hired to kill him? No, because having beaten up the Killer’s girlfriend and trashed his house, they went back to their homes and are now making no effort to look for him. This is convenient as it means that the Killer can track them down separately and kill them.

After some more shenanigans involving the client who hired him in the first place, the Killer retires with all the money he’s made in his long and lucrative career. Does he have to create a new identity and set up a new home in a distant corner of the world? Not a bit of it. He goes back to his house in the Dominican Republic, a place which has been compromised and might well now be known to other assassins, and relaxes on a sun lounger.

What might have happened after the missed shot: Hodges could say to the Killer that they either owed the client a hit and would have to follow-up despite the increased security, or they could hand the money back. The former would make a story, but it wouldn’t have the betrayal trope vital to lazy storytellers in this genre. If Hodges really decided that the Killer was now useless, he should have hired competent assassins, briefed them properly, and laid low till they reported the Killer was dealt with. It didn't matter to the client, certainly, who could have been told that the Killer had been iced and would have believed it.

Why was this plot such a mess? I suspect because it’s based on a graphic novel by a videogame writer, both mediums being stronger on style than on substance or on coherent storytelling. Why wasn’t the plotting fixed by Andrew Kevin Walker, a screenwriter with a number of hits to his name, and David Fincher, who ought to be able by now to tell if story elements make no sense? Don’t know, but it may be because they no longer expect audiences to bother to question what they’re seeing on screen. If plots are only going to be skin-deep, no wonder screenwriters are worried about being replaced by AI.

When logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead

To properly appreciate just how disturbing Jefferson Airplane’s "White Rabbit" is, you need to burn all your furniture, daub luminous graffiti on the walls of your house, and crank up the hi-fi to a volume that could liquefy human bone. That’s the scene Michael Douglas comes home to in David Fincher’s The Game. His life is being taken to pieces and it’s going to take more than the King’s men to put it back together again.

What makes Grace Slick’s original version of the song so much more unsettling than most of the "White Rabbit" covers is the way she delivers it so plainly. The tone is hectoring, not haunting; fanatical, not febrile. And that’s what makes it powerful. The stark, shouty simplicity of the presentation. The whole nightmare otherworldliness is right there in the lyrics, and Ms Slick delivers them in a relentless martial rhythm that has its own unstoppable momentum. You are dropping down a rabbit hole and there's no parachute. Dressing it all up in a self-consciously “weird” melody would only weaken it.

Are there other examples of that in other media? There’s a superbly creepy one in The Fearless Vampire Killers. When Alfie Bass sits up on his bier there’s no showing-off in the photography. Polanski films it the scene as plain and stark and shocking as a dream. It’s funny at the same time, of course, but that only makes it more unsettling.

Or how about the ghost stories of M R James? Unadorned prose and almost a humdrum narrative frame from which the supernatural pokes through like a mouse in the skirting board. I find that much more shuddery than Lovecraft’s florid prose, always so anxious to assure us this is all very, very frightening. Likewise, there are more scares in one minute of Let The Right One In than in all the last decade’s output of Hollywood horror movies, precisely because Tomas Alfredson plays it completely unplugged.

The best episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is “The Body” where any attempt to dress up the drama with eerie music and clever-clever direction would insulate us from the raw emotion. Instead, Joss Whedon strips that all away and we’re left with no cosy refuge such as the usual fictional wrapper would provide. Result: forty-four minutes of intense drama that leave you genuinely shaken.

Can you think of other examples from prose, movies, music or comics where simplicity delivers a punch that could not have been achieved through showmanship?