‘The Killer’ Review: He’s a Deadly Bore

David Fincher can’t get enough of that murderous stuff — his filmography bleedeth over with miscreants (“Alien 3”), home invaders (“Panic Room”) and multiple maniacs (“Seven,” “Zodiac,” “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” “Gone Girl”). During one of his periodic breaks from painting the big screen red, Fincher served as a producer and director on the Netflix show “Mindhunter,” another of his visually impeccable, morgue-cold creep-outs. This one was about F.B.I. agents profiling serial killers like Edmund Kemper, a ghoul whose silkily insinuating manner resonated more deeply than the show, which ended after two seasons.

“Mindhunter” was easier to admire than to love, which is habitually true of Fincher’s work and was certainly true of his last movie, “Mank,” an Old Hollywood exhumation about powerful people who kill dreams and souls. In Hobbesian terms, life in a Fincher film tends to be solitary and poor, nasty and brutish, if not necessarily short. That’s the case again in his most recent movie, “The Killer,” about a nameless hit man — played by Michael Fassbender — a chatty loner first seen waiting for a victim to show up. In time, the mark appears, the Killer shoots but misses, and spends the remainder of the story trying to clean up the mess.

“The Killer” is based on a French comic book with the same title written by Alexis Nolent (who goes by Matz) and illustrated by Luc Jacamon. The protagonist is an outwardly ordinary-looking hit man who’s as physically unassuming as he is inevitably nihilistic: Other people are awful, the world is hopeless, “we’re living on a pile of corpses,” etc. He quotes Christ and Kazantzakis, pals around with kindred villains, regularly has sex with balloon-breasted ladies but also spends a lot of time alone, which means the comic panels overflow with his loathing and insipid thoughts. What makes him ostensibly interesting isn’t his job or body count; what’s intriguing, at least before your eyes finally glaze over, is that he’s dull.

The idea of an anti-Bond type with an illegal license to kill is, yes, an idea, one that flickers weakly on the page amid a mass of genre clichés. What’s most distinctive about the comic is the contrast between its protagonist and Jacamon’s cinematic illustrations, with their rich hues, canted angles and interplay between realism and expressionism. You keep reading only to keep looking. Fincher’s visual approach in the movie is relatively muted by contrast. He bathes the screen with sulfurous yellow, throws in a few showy shots — an unblinking eye seen through a gun scope — and, as he likes to do, goes dark and then darker, as in one extended fight sequence that’s so dimly lit it sometimes hovers on the threshold of visibility.