The Killer review: It’s a killer role, but Fassbender’s hitman lacks the Jackal’s bite, writes BRIAN VINER

The Killer (15, 118 mins) 

Verdict: Trigger-happy thriller 

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Cat Person (15, 118 mins) 

Verdict: I hate to be a sourpuss, but… 

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Fifty years have passed since the release of The Day Of The Jackal, Fred Zinnemann’s gripping adaptation of the novel by Frederick Forsyth.

So film buffs, or more likely assassin buffs, will find a pleasing symmetry in The Killer, which begins with a hitman preparing for a job in Paris.

That’s where Edward Fox’s title character in the 1973 thriller got his shot at the French president, Charles de Gaulle. And in The Killer, it’s where Michael Fassbender’s title character spends days staking out a swanky penthouse, waiting in the rented apartment opposite for a clear line of sight to his target, a man who might be a politician, an oligarch or a master criminal. We never find out.

I first saw this Netflix production — which opens in cinemas today before streaming from next Friday — at this year’s Venice Film Festival.

Afterwards, opinions were sharply divided between those who thought the opening scenes deadly dull and those, like me, who were absorbed.

Michael Fassbender’s title character spends days staking out a swanky penthouse, waiting in the rented apartment opposite for a clear line of sight to his target

Even though David Fincher’s film doesn’t quite deliver on its early promise, it playfully chronicles the tedious side of an occupation imbued, if only by the movies, with excitement and even glamour.

As with The Jackal, we never learn the assassin’s real name, yet still we can relate to the character as he goes about the mundane side of his business.

It’s very smartly done, letting us in on his thoughts as day after day, night after night, he goes to sleep, wakes up, listens to the greatest hits of The Smiths, and then goes out onto the street as anonymously as he can, choosing the guise of a German tourist.

‘No one wants to interact with a German tourist,’ he rationalises. ‘Parisians avoid them like the rest of the world avoid street mimes.’

The high-performance rifle, it emerges, is not his favourite tool. He refers to assassination by bullet as one of his ‘Annie Oakley jobs’, and ponders wistfully on the way he used to do it — with slow poison or ‘a nice quiet drowning’. With that and other witty lines, we do seem to be set for something special from Fincher and screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker, who worked together on the hit 1995 serial-killer thriller Se7en.

Tilda Swinton plays an enigmatic gun-for-hire in The Killer

Yet The Killer gradually lets us down, just as our Morrissey-loving assassin lets himself down by, erm, missing. Heaven knows, he’s miserable now.

And more significantly, he’s in danger, as all hell breaks loose and he’s chased around Paris, finally making it to the airport where he uses one of his many fake passports to scarper.

By the way, his aliases are all fictional screen characters such as Oscar Madison, Archie Bunker, Lou Grant and Sam Malone.

It is one of this film’s many whimsical flourishes that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, for why would a man so intent on keeping the lowest possible profile, so dedicated to his craft that he keeps whispering pseudo-philosophical aphorisms he’s picked up, such as ’empathy is weakness’, use an alias that might attract the attention of anyone moderately cine or telly-literate?

Anyway, the silliness intensifies as he discovers that whoever ordered the hit that he botched now wants him dead instead.

When a pair of assassins, one male and one female, come looking for him, the hunter becomes the hunted… and later turns hunter again, setting up one very good fight scene in the Louisiana swamplands (as in all films of this type, the lead character skips around the world like a turbo-charged Michael Palin).

It is followed by a highly improbable encounter in a restaurant with the hitwoman, played by none other than Tilda Swinton. Splendid though she is as an enigmatic gun-for-hire, and good as Fassbender is throughout, it has long since become clear that The Killer, while inviting us to take it seriously, never quite earns that degree of respect. But it’s very watchable.

Cat Person isn’t, really. It has its moments and boasts a classy performance by Britain’s own Emilia Jones (daughter of Aled) as an American sophomore student, but it’s a story of sex and sexual politics that falls over itself trying to be a thriller, and ultimately isn’t a particularly plausible one.

Jones plays Margot, whose relationship with the significantly older Robert (played by Nicholas Braun — hapless cousin Greg in the TV hit Succession) develops through a series of text messages. But texting is a shaky base for romance.

Susanna Fogel’s film, adapted from a short story that created a tremendous stir when it was published in The New Yorker six years ago, duly hints that Robert might be a creep, a stalker or even a killer.

And not only that, but he might even be a dog guy… who only pretends to love cats.

Emilia Jones plays Margot, whose relationship with the significantly older Robert (played by Nicholas Braun — hapless cousin Greg in the TV hit Succession) develops through a series of text messages

Susanna Fogel’s film, adapted from a short story that created a tremendous stir when it was published in The New Yorker six years ago, duly hints that Robert might be a creep, a stalker or even a killer

Margot isn’t sure, dumping him mainly because he’s hopeless in bed. From that point on, the tension is artificially inflated, but then it’s been like that from the start, when Margot keeps walking back to her room on a busy college campus through spookily deserted streets, presumably on the basis that it’s after midnight and the other students are perforce all indoors.

It’s a shame, really, because the film has plenty of valid stuff to say, building on the hyperbolic Margaret Atwood quote captioned at the start: that men are afraid women will laugh at them, and women are afraid that men will kill them.

It’s just not quite clever enough to carry it off.

Boo! The creepy characters lurking at your cinema 

Of all the screen adaptations of Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous 1886 novella, Doctor Jekyll (15, 90 mins, HHIII) is one of the stranger ones, starring Eddie Izzard as a scarlet lipsticked billionaire recluse called Nina Jekyll, who has a psychotic alter ego: Rachel Hyde.

Dr J needs a carer, so hires a young guy fresh out of prison, desperate for a job. This is Rob, whose full name, in one of the script’s sillier twists, turns out to be… Robert Louis Stevenson. Still, Rob is very nicely and believably played by Scott Chambers.

Of all the screen adaptations of Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous 1886 novella, Doctor Jekyll (15, 90 mins, HHIII) is one of the stranger ones, starring Eddie Izzard as a scarlet lipsticked billionaire

Izzard works hard enough but always seems to be play-acting, and even the fine actress Lindsay Duncan is more than a little hammy as a forbidding, Mrs Danvers-style estate manager

Five Nights At Freddy’s (15, 110 mins, HHIII) is the other horror release ahead of Halloween

Alas, the same isn’t true of either Jekyll or Hyde. Izzard works hard enough but always seems to be play-acting, and even the fine actress Lindsay Duncan is more than a little hammy as a forbidding, Mrs Danvers-style estate manager.

At least she’s putting the ham in Hammer Horror, though, for this film, directed by the aptly named Joe Stephenson, marks the rebirth of the venerable brand, founded in 1934, following major investment from the even more aptly named tycoon John Gore.

Five Nights At Freddy’s (15, 110 mins, HHIII) is the other horror release ahead of Halloween. Inspired by the video game of the same name, it begins as a decent psychological thriller about a security guard (Josh Hutcherson) down on his luck, haunted by the abduction of his young brother years earlier.

But it descends into slasher nonsense, as the child-abduction story merges with that of murderous animatronic rabbits and teddy bears. Five Nights At Freddy’s is four nights too many.

Also showing…  

Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allows (15, 104 mins)

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Typist Artist Pirate King (12A, 108 mins) 

Rating:

Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allows takes its name from the 1955 Douglas Sirk film made at the peak of Hudson’s popularity, a year after Magnificent Obsession, also directed by Sirk, turned him into a major movie star.

Cleverly using clips from Hudson’s films to refer to what was happening in his private life, Stephen Kijack’s excellent documentary tells the fascinating story, as relevant today as ever, of how the Hollywood machine went to work on Hudson. At 29 he was compelled to marry his agent’s secretary so that his homosexuality could be kept from an adoring public.

Cleverly using clips from Hudson’s films to refer to what was happening in his private life, Stephen Kijack’s excellent documentary tells the fascinating story

Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allows takes its name from the 1955 Douglas Sirk film made at the peak of Hudson’s popularity

Typist Artist Pirate King is Carol Morley’s drama about the Sunderland-born artist Audrey Amiss, brilliantly played by Monica Dolan

The tragic irony of his story is that, after working so hard for so long to conceal his sexuality, his Aids-related death, aged 59, helped to triple funding for research into the illness. In death he became a gay icon.

But there is much more to this film than Hudson’s sexuality. It reminds us what a huge star he was, and indeed what a fine actor, while also dishing up some choice gossip. For instance, there was no love lost between him and the bisexual James Dean when they made Giant (1956) together, evidently because of Hudson’s rebuffed private advances. For anyone interested in that golden era of Hollywood, it’s compelling stuff.

So, in a very different way, is Typist Artist Pirate King, Carol Morley’s drama about the Sunderland-born artist Audrey Amiss (brilliantly played by Monica Dolan), whose fragile mental health (as in the case of so many artists through the centuries) actually fuelled her creativity.

Morley invents a road-trip back to her native Wearside made by Amiss and the long-suffering social worker (Kelly Macdonald) whose job it is to check in on her, but is manoeuvred into driving her the length of the country. It’s whimsical, funny and sad.

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