Michael Caine once said he thought Tom Cruise was an excellent actor but wouldn’t be acknowledged for this until Cruise got older and stopped appearing in teen heartthrob roles.  Caine was pointing out how Hollywood tends to appreciate actors for looks first and artistry second—part of a self-deprecating explanation for why Caine was considered a “great actor” early on.  Whether or not this is true, Michael Caine certainly belongs to what we sometimes think of as an earlier, classier generation of actors, many of whom were English and seemed to be good as well as good looking.

It’s not hard to think of Michael Fassbender in that category, an Irish-German trained in England, capable of a decent Macbeth as well as many supporting roles in sci-fi films.  And even if Fassbender couldn’t be more different than Cruise in terms of affect and culture, he still gets a lot of Cruise-ish work.  David Fincher’s The Killer is a recent example.  We can easily imagine Cruise’s “Vincent” from Collateral as the nameless hitman in The Killer; though, Fassbender’s voiceover is more like Ed Norton in Flight Club (also a Fincher movie) and less in the Heat–Collateral tradition of Michael Mann’s stylized noir.

Fincher loves to generate dramatic tension by starting off in an undramatic way, even in a thriller about an international assassin.  Routine and mundanity is a Fincher signature and he does this better than anyone, which The Spectator’s Alexander Larman points out, calling The Killer “a black-comic masterpiece” on par with Fight Club: “If you found Fight Club and Gone Girl funny, you’re going to love the similarly bleak tone here.”  Maybe it’s bleak.  It’s certainly laced with black humor, but it also shows us something slightly new, diverging from the formulaic morality play that hitman films usually seem destined to become.

Larman mentions “Early hype suggested that The Killer would follow the exploits of Fassbender’s anonymous assassin as he (inconveniently) develops a conscience, presumably setting up an existential quandary,” which sounds straight out of assassin-film Central Casting.  Thankfully, this is not what The Killer did.  Fassbender’s character never develops a conventionally moralistic conscience.  Nor are we encouraged to see him as a product of his environment, a beleaguered anti-hero merely playing out the hand he was dealt by circumstances and fate.  Rather, he tries, with varying degrees of success, to adhere to his personal philosophy: “Anticipate; don’t improvise.”  His highest value is not redemption in the eyes of the audience but job efficiency, which is what makes The Killer different and interesting.

Contrast this with Jessica Chastain’s character in Ava, another international assassin film, released in 2020 and directed by Tate Taylor, who, for all his ostensible qualities as a director, is evidently no David Fincher.  Ava is an assassin struggling with addiction, tormented by family drama, and for some reason never fully explained, roundly hated by one of her handlers to the point of him trying to eliminate her.  It’s a movie doused in conventional morality and reeking with guilt as the protagonist meanders through the emotional wasteland of her career between unpleasant family visits and AA meetings.  Essentially, Ava is a movie trying to get us on the main character’s side, trying to motivate us to put an arm around her and say, yes, you kill people for a living, but you really shouldn’t be so hard on yourself.  That is also very funny and absurd, but unintentionally so.

The Killer is different.  It’s a movie that takes its ethos not from soppy Hollywood morality but from the mission statement of an Amazon fulfillment warehouse: efficiency is job one.  It’s bleak because we’ve come to find that perspective vaguely horrifying in an era of technocratic, anti-life post-industrial culture, where STEM has bludgeoned the humanities into Peking opera irrelevance and artificial intelligence has grown increasingly monstrous in service of profit.  It’s an echo of Black Mirror’s “Metalhead,” where a woman robbing such a warehouse gets hunted down by a killer robot that goes far beyond the bounds of anything resembling fairness or reason.  Human concerns like restorative justice, punishment fitting the crime, and personal honor have no place in this brave, new Gradgrind-ish corporate utilitarianism—which may not be that new after all (thank you, Charles Dickens).

Fassbender’s character embodies this, subscribes to it, aspires only to peak efficiency. He explains, “If I’m effective, it’s because of one simple fact.  I . . . don’t . . . give . . . a . . . fuck.”  He isn’t hung up on the usual human concerns.  “Luck isn’t real,” he says.  “Nor is karma, or sadly, justice.  As much as I’d like to pretend these concepts exist.”  There’s only job performance and production standards, which he pursues with the exactitude and precision of a killer robot, even when an unforeseen twist forces him to turn against his employer.

Ava turns against her employer because she feels like she’s bad and wants to be good.  The Killer’s narrator does it because that’s the best practice indicated in the job manual.  The former is a clichéd, forgettable film we’ve seen a hundred times.  The latter is an interesting, disturbing comment on an emergent aspect of our cultural mindset.  And that is why The Killer may haunt us long after we’ve moved on to other, far less insightful, entertainment.