David Fincher’s horribly addictive samurai procedural, adapted by Andrew Kevin Walker from the graphic novel by Alexis Nolent, stars Michael Fassbender as the un-named titular hitman: an ascetic who in the movie’s sensationally low-key opening sequence tells us about dealing with the job’s biggest challenge: boredom. He internally monologues on this subject, and many others, including his views on the amorality of the universe and the music of the Smiths, while sitting high up in a rented WeWork office space with his long-range rifle, next to a five-star Paris hotel, waiting, waiting, waiting, for the VIP guest to show up in the suite opposite and get a bullet in the head.
But despite the killer’s cool and pitiless rigour, his elaborate discipline and impressive yoga postures, something goes terribly wrong just for no reason at all; the wealthy, ruthless and now angrily disappointed people who commissioned the killer will now want to kill him so he will have to kill them. Now he says there is a new maxim: WWJWBD: What Would John Wilkes Booth Do?
