The posters and ads for “The Killer,” a Netflix movie that’s premiering at the Venice Film festival, feature a terrific tagline: “Execution is everything.” The pun is crystal clear in its cleverness, yet there’s a third layer of meaning to it. We realize that the chemistry of cinema hasn’t just put us in the killer’s shoes - it has put us on his side. The target arrives, and as we watch him move about the apartment, the film generates the hypnotic tension one remembers from “The Day of the Jackal” or certain moments in Brian De Palma films. And when the killer puts music on his earbuds (the Smiths’ “Well I Wonder”) to get into his groove, it becomes the needle drop as homicidal pop-opera soundtrack. At one point, the door of the WeWork office opens. Just watching Fassbender do push-ups in his black rubber gloves wires up the atmosphere. Absolutely goddamn right.” Committing a hit may be mostly about counting down the minutes and hours, but Fincher builds the sequence with a veteran suspense filmmaker’s cunning. Fassbender speaks in a low affectless drone, saying things like “On Annie Oakley jobs, distance is the only advantage” or “No one who can afford me needs to waste time winning me over to some cause” or “Most people refuse to believe that the great beyond is anything more than a cold, infinite void.” He sounds as dread-squeezed and controlled as Martin Sheen in “Apocalypse Now” when he said, “Never get out of the boat. “The Killer” turns out to be a movie about waiting around to kill people. The killer has nothing to do but wait for the target to arrive, and during that time, he speaks to us on the soundtrack, talking about his methodology, his philosophy, and the fact that if you don’t like waiting around, this work is probably not for you. The gun shoots large gold bullets that can penetrate glass without shifting their trajectory. He’s got his huge black telephoto rifle, placed on a table whose height he can manipulate. The killer, who is played by Michael Fassbender, has set up his sniper’s nest in an empty, darkened WeWork space across the street. His home occupies the entire penthouse floor of one of those ornate block-long Parisian apartment buildings. The hit is taking place in Paris, and the target is some sort of powerful corporate tycoon who we, like the killer, know nothing about. In the bravura opening sequence of David Fincher’s “ The Killer,” we watch the title character, a cold-as-dry-ice professional hitman who is never named, as he prepares to assassinate his latest victim.
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