Fincher's followup to Mank, and unfortunately extending his run of dogs; the last feature he made that's worth watching is Gone Girl. A Netflix production.
There's not a lot going on here. Michael Fassbender (whose last good feature was Macbeth in 2015 I think) plays a Jackal, vacantly, and we all know how that one goes. And if we don't, we've seen Kill Bill. There's a relentless voiceover of Fassbender's thoughts, a sort of self-help guide for professional killers. There's also "Q-Tip" Tilda Swinton mouthing off like a Bond villain.
I was a bit weirded out by the soundtrack: Fassbender's assassin has The Smiths's Meat is Murder as his workday playlist, so inevitably their best-by-far track How Soon is Now? comes on at the critical moment. A later criticality at his jungle lair features Portishead's Glory Box at extreme volume, presumably to cover the events that occurred a few hours prior (I'm guessing). It is as if nothing has happened in almost twenty years. Surely Trent Reznor (with a nod from collaborator Atticus Ross) could've slipped a Nine Inch Nails classic in to round out the retro.
At times it put me in mind of McQueen's Shame: masterfully made, compulsive and joyless, unnecessary.
Manohla Dargis. Based on a French comic. The fight scene was so dim. Wendy Ide. Shane Danielsen, spilling more words than it's worth, suggests seeing Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï (1967) instead. Glenn Kenny: it helps if you're American.