Not intending to review this movie, just want to rant a bit about how much it annoyed me. Maybe some spoilers.

I went into this hoping it would be a kind of 21st century Day of the Jackal, which is how it was marketed. Turns out it’s more of a pound shop John Wick.

There are some ‘interesting’ politics involved, as you might expect from someone like Fincher, who could ‘understand both sides’ of the writers and actors strike. The assassin played by Fassbender has the personality of a neoliberal banker or perhaps an aspirational redditor - ‘all history has been the few exploiting the many’, he says - ‘the important thing is to make sure you’re one of the few’. By the end, and after he’s killed a bunch of people and is chilling in his luxury mansion built on the profits of murder, he decides he’s actually now ‘one of the many’. I suppose that’s meant to indicate he’s redeemed himself, somehow.

What really interested me about the politics of the movie though, is how enthusiastically apolitical it is. The assassin muses about how he’s killed more people than any serial killer. You couldn’t make a Hollywood movie about a charming, sexy, anti-hero serial killer - so why can audiences suspend their ethics to sympathise with an assassin? Probably because, as the assassin repeatedly states, he’s “just doing his job”; he’s just “a small part in a larger machine”. Murder is abhorrent, except if it’s done for money, - then it becomes just business. This is not the message of the film, but it’s what it unwittingly implies.

I also generally dislike this kind of mishmash pseudo-realism aesthetic that is so popular nowdays. The film keeps veering between gritty believability and absurdist Hollywood action. I feel like this is responsible for the way that many people understand violence, people in particular who have never suffered from it. Fights are like video game brawls where you can get smacked in the face repeatedly and then come back to win with only a scratch. It’s fantasy violence, which is fine in a movie about, say, space robots, but not really fine in a representation that keeps hinting it’s true to life.
There isn’t really much more I can say about the film - just a forgettable bore by a washed up, politically suspect director. Interested to know what anyone else thought of it though.