‘The Killer’ on Netflix has one of the best fight scenes ever

If you grew up a ’90s bro, as I did, you’ve been looking forward to David Fincher’s “The Killer” ever since Netflix posted the trailer. “The Killer” makes a return to Fincher’s cinematic roots, reuniting him with “Seven” screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker and featuring an endless number of quotable, “Fight Club”-esque bro koans throughout the main character’s narration. Also: lots of people die horribly in it. This is the kind of movie that I pretend I’ve grown out of, but very much have not.

“The Killer” isn’t as sadistic as “Seven” — which established a dark, gritty aesthetic that present-day tentpole directors constantly seek to emulate, only to fail. This is more of a straightforward action movie. Michael Fassbender, who will always be handsomer than me, is the titular character: an unnamed contract killer who works alone, with only his inner monologue to keep him company. Our killer is extremely fastidious in his methods, and never lets his emotions get in the way of his business… right up until the moment he f—ks up a job, sees his girlfriend (played by Sophie Charlotte) suffer the consequences of his mistake, and then sets about getting retribution. 

If all of this sounds “John Wick”-y to you, you’re not far off. There’s even the requisite scene where our antihero has to dig up a secret trove of weapons and fake IDs that he keeps buried in his backyard. That’s when you know that s—t is about to get real.

So it’s only the Fincher touch that differentiates “The Killer” from its genre siblings, but you know how effective that touch can be: lens flares, crystal-clear night shots, an elegant feeling of menace in the air at every moment. And if you love Fincher as much as I do, you know that’s more than enough to make “The Killer” worth seeing, especially when the action itself kicks in.

Just over an hour into this movie comes a fight scene that’s the best I’ve seen in any film this year. It’s one of the best fight scenes I’ve ever seen, period. It’s so good, I don’t want to spoil it in full for you. Instead, I’m going to list a number of the elements that made it flawless, from both an execution and an entertainment standpoint:

– A guard dog that must be drugged with heavy tranquilizers tucked into raw hamburger meat.
– A bad guy who only goes by the character name “The Brute” (played by Sala Baker, who appears un-brutelike in everyday life).
– A gun getting knocked out of the good guy’s hand, sliding under a bed and out of reach. Guns end a fight scene much too quickly. You need to get rid of them for a moment so that the audience can be treated to…
– Lots of hand-to-hand combat.
– Blunt objects.
– Fire pokers.
– A desperate search for a knife that only turns up a cheese grater.
– A painting smashed over the brute’s head.
– The good guy hitching a piggyback ride onto the bad guy while trying to keep him in a chokehold. This is a move that I would employ should any other brute one day attempt to kill me.
– People getting slammed through glass windows.
– People being suplexed onto dining tables.
– People getting slammed INTO a wall-mounted television (not the TV!).
– People getting slammed down, with great ferocity, onto hardwood floors.
– The bad guy getting impaled up the butt by an overturned table leg.
– Broken glass. All of the glass gets smashed in this fight. Fassbender’s Killer fights back against the brute by forehanding a bottle into him AND smashing him repeatedly with a glass water pipe. TALK ABOUT HITS FROM THE BONG!
– The good guy finally getting his hands on the gun.
– Blood from the deciding gunshot spattering all over the toilet.

Just typing all that made me want to go wrestle a grizzly bear. This is flawless action choreography, all packed into a tidy, coherent four minutes. You have seen fight scenes with these elements before, almost certainly in some cookie-cutter Marvel movie. The reason those other scenes fail is because they’re too long, they’re overly reliant on poor visual effects, and, most important, they don’t hurt. If a character gets planted into the ground by a Thanos-type who’s stronger than an army of silverback gorillas, they should at least have to catch their breath for a second. Because if a character doesn’t hurt, then you can’t hurt for them.

You will hurt for Fassbender in “The Killer” (and for his victims, as well). Nothing about Fassbender’s ability to take a blow in this film is realistic, but you still FEEL it when he gets put through a pane of glass over, and over, and over again. Broken glass is important in fight scenes, because you and I know exactly what kind of damage broken glass can do in real life. We know how it feels to be cut. We know how it feels to fall down hard. We know how it feels to be frightened.  A good fight scene plays to those memories within us, and to the fear that we’ll have to endure them some time again in the future.

Relative to other action films, “Wick” included, this centerpiece fight in “The Killer” is short. But, as with a real fight, it feels much, much longer than the handful of minutes that it lasts. Time expands when you’re in pain, when you’re in danger and when you have to escape from harm. That Fincher was able to accurately portray this violent form of sensory overload on celluloid is both predictable (he is David Fincher, after all), and also exhilarating.

Despite a twin work stoppage that brought Hollywood to a standstill until just this week, 2023 has proven the finest year for cinema not just since the pandemic, but perhaps over the last decade and change. Old masters like Martin Scorsese did some of their finest work, while relatively younger director Greta Gerwig managed, where so many of her peers had failed, to bring a multimillion-dollar franchise in line with her own cinematic voice. 

Meanwhile, here’s David Fincher making a stylishly bloody affair. It won’t win him any Oscars, and it may not stay in the cultural firmament the way some of his other works have. But it says clearly — both to the audience and to the film industry itself — this is how it’s done. There’s nothing new about “The Killer,” but there doesn’t have to be. There just has to be a rogue table leg going up the bad guy’s ass.