‘The Killer’ review: Netflix’s latest feels like just killing time for a globetrotting assassin

Like any streaming giant with an occasional interest in putting its titles in theaters first, if only for a moment, Netflix has given us plenty of junk. Plenty. “The Gray Man.” “Red Notice.” So many hundreds of millions of dollars of junk. Not entertaining junk; I like entertaining junk. Just junk.

With a higher level of filmmaker and craft, junk becomes a different and more depressing question — why this material? For example, director David Fincher and his latest, “The Killer,” a sleek, tight, fastidiously executed nothing.

It’s an assassin’s-revenge lark starring Michael Fassbender as the killer with no name, whose compartmentalized life involves camera-friendly yoga while waiting to eliminate his targets, and a dreamy home life on the beach in the Dominican Republic where his woman (Sophie Charlotte) waits for him. The script by Andrew Kevin Walker, who wrote Fincher’s popular serial killer whammy “Se7en,” adapts the French comic book series by Alexis “Mat” Nolent and Luc Jacamon and strips it of its original thin coat of political commentary. No politics for Fincher! Too messy, too real-world. “The Killer” is going for a funsy, heartless diversion, immersed only in its own sense of cool.

The initial assignment, preceded by scads of murmured voice-overs from Fassbender, goes haywire, and suddenly the killer in “The Killer” has his hands full. Back in the U.S., his hapless handlers and angry clients hang him out to dry (I’m condensing the narrative description because it’s pretty dull). An attempt on his life ends up putting his woman in the hospital, near death. The rest of the film, dutifully carved into segments set in Paris, the Dominican Republic, New Orleans, Florida, New York state (played by St. Charles, Illinois; a key scene with Fassbender and Tilda Swinton was filmed in the Hotel Baker) and Chicago for a final confrontation.

Fincher and his editor Kirk Baxter tighten the screws and push “The Killer” along with robotic efficiency. There’s one good, sadistic Florida sequence pitting Fassbender against a guard dog and an equally snarling hit man who is much, much brawnier. But he’s just a disposable thug, not the protagonist, so he’s out of the way soon enough. With the Smiths on the soundtrack (the killer’s go-to mixtape during working hours), and composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross providing the underscoring for a high-functioning serial killer (sorry, “hit man”) and his newly fraught life, “The Killer” knows what it’s doing.

And I guess I just don’t like what it’s doing, because it isn’t enough. Fincher has directed many fine films, “Gone Girl” among them. He has one defiantly challenging masterwork to his credit: the 2007 “Zodiac,” one of the great true-crime procedurals of our century, and likely the most brilliantly frustrating one, because the factually grounded dramatization demanded it.

“The Killer” has something different on its mind: nothing. Its fans — and Fincher’s latest has plenty — call it pure suspense, a thriller stripped for parts, plus a few stray jokes. At airport rental car counters and the like, the killer uses aliases taken from TV shows: Sam Malone, Robert Hartley. He has his share of zingers, which sound pretty weird given Fassbender’s robotic, unblinking air of otherworldliness. He’s scarcely less alien than the android he played so well in “Alien: Covenant.” When we finally get around to a scene that feels like something’s happening, the steely showdown with Swinton’s cryptic woman-behind-it-all, it’s a staring contest, basically. We know who will live, and who won’t, and “The Killer” — now in a handful of theaters en route to its Nov. 10 Netflix streaming premiere — is, at heart, an elevator pitch for a two-hour pilot for a slick, junky Netflix series about a globe-trotting assassin.

———

'THE KILLER'

1.5 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for strong violence, language and brief sexuality)

Running time: 1:58

How to watch: Now in theaters and streaming on Netflix Nov. 10

———