• ⇤
• ⇽
• ≡
• ⇾
• ⇥

movie review - The Killer

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

I needed a break after some very long weeks of late. I started up Netflix and there was The Killer. It's about an assassin many years into a career and on a job spent waiting in a dead "WeWork" office in Paris. For a week. When his target -- a private figure, from what we can tell -- finally shows up, the assassin misses his shot. He goes home to the Dominican Republic and finds his wife beaten almost to death.

With her in the hospital, he begins a mission that honestly I think should have been how Taken played out way back when. He uses one thin lead that he's got -- the attackers came in a taxi -- and works his magic. Soon he's in Lousiana, then Florida, then a ritzy suburb of New York, and finally Chicago. He knows he'll take a beating en route, but his objective is to ensure that the promise he makes his wife's brother is kept. That will not happen again.

It's a spare story and frankly I think they leave a bit more to your interpretation than I was expecting from Netflix. I had to play the last bit of narration over three times, I'm sure I'll have to think it over for a couple of days.

"Sayonara North America," indeed, my friend.