‘The Killer’ Review: David Fincher’s Lean, Mean Hitman Drama Hits The Target – Venice Film Festival
deadline.comIn principle, using the rainy-day, kitchen-sink post-rock of Manchester band The Smiths so prominently in a film like The Killer seems incredibly perverse, given that it’s an exotic, globe-trotting thriller about an American assassin.
But in reality, it’s actually very sound choice indeed: legend has it that the band’s singer, Morrissey, had two reasons for naming his band so, the first being that “Smith” is one of the most common and thus unremarkable surnames in the world.
The second, and much more subversive theory, suggests that it’s also a reference to David and Maureen Smith, brother-in-law and sister of ’60s serial killer Myra Hindley, the snappily dressed couple whose testimony blew open the Moors Murderers case and whose beatnik likenesses adorn the cover of Sonic Youth’s 1990 album “Goo”.
There’s a slight chance David Fincher and his creative team may not know these things, but, either way, his latest feature is a similarly spiked cocktail that mixes the wholly mundane with the chillingly macabre, a terrifically lean and violent action movie that might be his most purely satisfying yet.
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