Review: 'The Killer,' with Michael Fassbender as an anonymous assassin, puts director David Fincher in his cold-hearted element

People who call David Fincher’s movies — from “Fight Club” to “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” to “The Social Network” to “Gone Girl” — cold and calculating are, admittedly, correct, but also reductive, because they’re cold and calculating for a reason, as proven in his latest, “The Killer.”

The title figure here, played by Michael Fassbender and not identified in any other way, is cold and calculating, because that’s his job. He is a contract killer, and when we meet him, he’s on the job — which, for a long time, involves sitting in an abandoned WeWork office in Paris, looking out the window and observing the goings-on in the hotel across the street. He catches some sleep, but never too long. He rolls out a mat and does push-ups. He waits for his moment.

And he monologues, in a near-constant narration, about the tips and tricks of doing what he does. “My process is purely logistical,” he said. “Forbid empathy. Trust no one. Fight only the battle you’re paid to fight.” He also listens to music — songs by The Smiths — because it’s “a useful distraction, a focus tool. Keeps the inner voice from wandering.”

But when the job in Paris goes haywire, and the target (Endre Hules) remains stubbornly alive, the killer has to do the one thing he hates: He has to improvise.

He flies “home” to Santo Domingo, and discovers that someone tried to kill his girlfriend (Sophie Charlotte). So now he goes about finding the people responsible — and since the hired-killer business is a tight circle of people, he knows with certainty who they are. So he travels to New Orleans, Florida, upstate New York and Chicago, to extract information and/or kill them, one at a time.

Fincher and screenwriter Andrew Kevin Waller (who wrote Fincher’s 1995 breakout movie, “Se7en”) adapt the French comic book with a clinical precision, for some of the tightest action set pieces you’re likely to see. The tension isn’t in whether he succeeds on his mission — he’s too much cunning to fail — but in watching him confront the various traps and barriers to the completion of his plan. 

The episodic structure allows for the killer’s intended victims some centerpiece moments. Best of all is Tilda Swinton, stealing her scenes as a professional rival who sees Fassbender and calmly remarks on the inevitability of this meeting and its predestined end. She even finds a bit of dark humor in the encounter, commenting about something “I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy — which, at the moment, I suppose, is you.”

Fassbender, as cool a performer as can be, is a perfect vessel for Fincher’s take on this methodical, seemingly unfeeling killer. Death, “The Killer” seems to say, is just another commodity — like office space at WeWork or a McDonald’s hamburger — and Fincher depicts Fassbender’s assassin as the Grim Reaper as the ultimate vulture capitalist.

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‘The Killer’

★★★1/2

Starts streaming Friday, November 10, on Netflix. Rated R for strong violence, language and brief sexuality. Running time: 118 minutes.