The visual parts are just Fincher by the numbers, nothing spectacular.
The dialogue is heinous, just truly unacceptably embarrassing for even like a first film. The narration never gets any better, he keeps repeating the same dumb bullshit "no empathy no remorse always have a plan" shit, sprinkled in with sigma male tweets about "living with the normies"(verbatim). The character dialogue is what you would write if you were writing a skit or pastiche about assassin crime thrillers but without any particular irony behind it, just absolutely dreadful. The only time it becomes compelling is when Tilda Swinton drags the film into adequacy by the sheer force of being a good actress delivering mid dialogue.
The pacing doesnt get any better really, it just chugs along at a sleepy pace, Guillermo Del Toro somehow called the film breezy and that makes me feel legitimately just gaslighted at.
Theres one fight scene that is comically out of place and over the top, its like if you've seen one of those John Wick 7 clips where he gets thrown down a minutes worth of stairs or theres a hallway of a dozen glass cases on each side, and the villain throws him into each one, one by one, slowly. Just baffling really.
Spoilers for that fight scene and also a really gross sexual wound detail
The guy that mr killer fights gets a chair leg shoved up his ass on accident, like literally he gets shoved and falls over on it, its the "haha yeah I tripped" excuse but it happens in the film.
You'd think that would be like comedic but then he walks around with blood audibly squishing out of his ass for another 3-4 minutes worth of fight scene, and in the middle of that happening he stops and starts casually delivering dialogue like "oh yeah you're the guy, mr killer, right? yeah I recognize you!" without any hint of pain from the still audibly dripping wound in his ass. And then mr killer man shoots him a bunch.
And this is the only fight scene in the film
.
The main character just sucks, he has no character. He has a girlfriend that sets off the whole plot of the film when she gets hurt but we literally only see her after she has already been hurt and then at the epilogue. A competent filmmaker would have either made a point to show us that they love each other and create emotional resonance for her getting hurt, or hammer home that mr killer man is an emotionless freak, but Fincher does neither.
At the end of the film the killer guy decides to not be a The Killer anymore and to stop killing, but theres literally no buildup to him deciding to do that, he just does it*. People keep making grand claims that this is about corporatism and the gig economy but I have no idea where they would come to that conclusion except if they decided to take artistic value from the gig economy advertising all over the film. Theres nothing about the main character that makes him seem like a gig economy guy, he's at peak physical health, he has a cool house, cool gf, cool everything, he's not a gig economy serf by literally any stretch of the imagination.
* There are in the most technical sense scenes that could be construed as being about convincing The Killer to stop killing, but in a film that has constant internal monologue narration, the narration doesnt spend a second to actually dwell on those scenes, its either Mr The Killer repeating his assassin mantras, or doing sigma male thinking. It doesnt work, if you are so gauche as to put a voice over narrative monologue in your film you cant hide character development outside of the monologue without very careful body language and other storytelling to counter the monologue.
The visual parts are just Fincher by the numbers, nothing spectacular.
The dialogue is heinous, just truly unacceptably embarrassing for even like a first film. The narration never gets any better, he keeps repeating the same dumb bullshit "no empathy no remorse always have a plan" shit, sprinkled in with sigma male tweets about "living with the normies"(verbatim). The character dialogue is what you would write if you were writing a skit or pastiche about assassin crime thrillers but without any particular irony behind it, just absolutely dreadful. The only time it becomes compelling is when Tilda Swinton drags the film into adequacy by the sheer force of being a good actress delivering mid dialogue.
The pacing doesnt get any better really, it just chugs along at a sleepy pace, Guillermo Del Toro somehow called the film breezy and that makes me feel legitimately just gaslighted at.
Theres one fight scene that is comically out of place and over the top, its like if you've seen one of those John Wick 7 clips where he gets thrown down a minutes worth of stairs or theres a hallway of a dozen glass cases on each side, and the villain throws him into each one, one by one, slowly. Just baffling really.
Spoilers for that fight scene and also a really gross sexual wound detail
The guy that mr killer fights gets a chair leg shoved up his ass on accident, like literally he gets shoved and falls over on it, its the "haha yeah I tripped" excuse but it happens in the film.
You'd think that would be like comedic but then he walks around with blood audibly squishing out of his ass for another 3-4 minutes worth of fight scene, and in the middle of that happening he stops and starts casually delivering dialogue like "oh yeah you're the guy, mr killer, right? yeah I recognize you!" without any hint of pain from the still audibly dripping wound in his ass. And then mr killer man shoots him a bunch.
And this is the only fight scene in the film
.
The main character just sucks, he has no character. He has a girlfriend that sets off the whole plot of the film when she gets hurt but we literally only see her after she has already been hurt and then at the epilogue. A competent filmmaker would have either made a point to show us that they love each other and create emotional resonance for her getting hurt, or hammer home that mr killer man is an emotionless freak, but Fincher does neither.
At the end of the film the killer guy decides to not be a The Killer anymore and to stop killing, but theres literally no buildup to him deciding to do that, he just does it*. People keep making grand claims that this is about corporatism and the gig economy but I have no idea where they would come to that conclusion except if they decided to take artistic value from the gig economy advertising all over the film. Theres nothing about the main character that makes him seem like a gig economy guy, he's at peak physical health, he has a cool house, cool gf, cool everything, he's not a gig economy serf by literally any stretch of the imagination.
* There are in the most technical sense scenes that could be construed as being about convincing The Killer to stop killing, but in a film that has constant internal monologue narration, the narration doesnt spend a second to actually dwell on those scenes, its either Mr The Killer repeating his assassin mantras, or doing sigma male thinking. It doesnt work, if you are so gauche as to put a voice over narrative monologue in your film you cant hide character development outside of the monologue without very careful body language and other storytelling to counter the monologue.