Why cinema loves a sniper
All hail the return of Michael Fassbender. The Oscar-nominated actor and X-Men star is back on our screens after a four-year hiatus (drove racing cars, moved to Portugal, had a child) and, wow, what a statement rebirth! He fills almost every frame of David Fincher’s The Killer and is dominant throughout as a top-tier assassin with a penchant for yoga, telescopic sights and the dulcet tones of Morrissey: the soundtrack, filtered through our protagonist’s headphones, is non-stop The Smiths, from opening to closing credits.
Fassbender’s no-name hitman opens the film in grand style, in an empty Parisian office block, where he assembles a powerful sniper’s rifle, performs some impressive downward dogs and ruminates on the central philosophies that have made him, thus far, the best in the business. “Popeye the Sailor said it best: ‘I am what I am!’” he purrs in what becomes near non-stop narration. Later he adds, beaten out in a rhythmic mantra, the more direct, “I. Don’t. Give. A. Fuck!”
Fincher premiered The Killer at the Venice Film Festival, where he claimed that Fassbender’s character was designed to creep audiences out.
“My hope is that someone will see this film and get very nervous about the person behind them in line at Home Depot,” he said. And yet, really, on all available evidence, courtesy of scene after scene of the killer at his most poised, professional and downright suave (knows cars, guns and kung-fu) this is a film that looks consistently and lovingly at its mesmerising anti-hero and quietly coos, like Patricia Arquette’s Alabama in True Romance, “You’re so cool!” And that’s because he’s a sniper.
Movies, clearly, love snipers. Always have and always will. There’s something about them, in their murderous eagle-eyed efficiency — the watching and the sadism — that runs directly into the DNA of the medium. And it’s an appeal that’s unusually devoid of moral context. Think of the great screen snipers such as, say, Edward Fox’s “the Jackal” in 1973’s The Day of the Jackal, stroking his custom-made rifle, complete with silencer, scope and explosive tipped bullets. “Beautiful piece of work,” he drools, minutes before famously blasting a watermelon to pieces in an Italian forest.
Fox’s Jackal is a murder-maniac who uses and then dispatches accomplices and witnesses with barely a flicker of emotion, and yet we somehow admire him. We urge him forward, hoping for the sake of narrative closure that he’ll complete his mission and finally assassinate the anonymous and uninteresting President Char
