Movie reviews: 'The Killer' is a slick, stylish thriller and a welcome return to the genre for David Fincher

'Wicked': 4 out of 5 stars Film critic Richard Crouse shares his take on newly-released movies including 'Wicked', 'Gladiator II' and more.

THE KILLER: 4 STARS

“The Killer,” a new thriller starring Michael Fassbender, now playing in theatres before moving to Netflix on November 10, is a welcome return to genre filmmaking for David Fincher, director of “Se7en,” “Gone Girl” and “Zodiac.”

In the film’s first chapter the unnamed title character is holed up in a rented Parisian We Work office across the street from a ritzy hotel. There to kill a prominent man who should be checking in any day now, the Killer is a coiled snake, ready to jump into action.

When he does leave “the office,” he dresses in beige, like a “German tourist,” with no distinguishing features, (save for his Fassbender movie star good looks). He’s Mr. Nobody, unrecognized and unrecognizable.

He is there for one reason; to kill. He calls it an “Annie Oakley” job, a shot from a rifle at long distance. It’s not as exciting as some of his other gigs, like slipping poison into a person’s coffee or making the deaths look like accidents, but it pays the bills.

He lives by a considered set of rules, an existential credo for the business of death.

“Forbid empathy,” he says. “Empathy is weakness.” “Anticipate, don’t improvise.” “Fight only the battle you’re paid to fight.”

He is careful, not prone to mistakes until the Paris assassination goes wrong and his bullet blows away his target’s companion, leaving the intended victim covered in gore, but very much alive.

An expert in the art of self-preservation, the Killer, through a circuitous route, under fake passports all carrying the name of old time sit com characters, beginning with Felix Unger, the meticulous half of “The Odd Couple,” eludes police. When he finally arrives at his home in the Dominican Republic, he finds his girlfriend has been assaulted, left near death in retaliation for his failed hit in Paris.

Asking himself, “WWJWBD”—"What Would John Wilkes Boothe Do?”—he jumps into action, vowing to get revenge on the people who attacked his girlfriend.

Moody and coldblooded, “The Killer” is a showcase for Fassbender, who hasn’t appeared on screen in four years. From Magneto in the X-Men films to the lead in Justin Kurzel’s 2015 version of “Macbeth” and “Alien: Covenant’s” android David 8 and the corrupt MI6 agent Paul in “Haywire,” he’s played villains before, but has rarely been this nonchalantly captivating. He sucks out much of the character’s humanity, leaving behind a deadly automaton, directed by the logistics of his job rather than any sort of moral compass. Life and death, for him, is transactional and part of the film’s pleasure is waiting to see when and if he will break and allow his humanity to shine through.

But despite the movie’s hardheartedness, director Fincher, working from a script by Andrew Kevin Walker builds-in a sense of fun. Fassbender’s deliberately robotic delivery is perfect as he deadpans lines like, “The Sunshine State. Where else can you find so many likeminded individuals… outside a penitentiary?”

“The Killer” is a slickly made, stylish thriller, with an anxiety inducing score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, that uses the central character’s aloofness as a hook to pull you to the edge of your seat.

FIVE NIGHTS AT FREDDY’S: 3 STARS

“Five Nights at Freddy’s,” is a new horror film starring Josh Hutcherson now playing in theatres, but it may feel familiar to some movie goers.

Referred to as “FNaF” by fans, it began in 2014 as a popular video game that has since spawned a number of sequels and spinoffs, including “Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location” and “Five Nights at Freddy's: Help Wanted.”

With the game’s creator Scott Cawthon signed on as co-writer and producer, the new film version offers up recognizable visual and audio call-backs to the video game series.

Then, there is the strange case of “Willy's Wonderland,” a 2021 Nic Cage cult film that fills its lungs with much of the same fetid air as “FNaF.” It’s like “Freddy’s” brother from another mother.

So, with so much history, is the new movie fresh enough to get a fresh rating?

On the big screen Hutcherson plays Mike Schmidt, a down-on-his luck guy desperate to make some cash and look after his withdrawn sister Abby (Piper Rubio). How desperate is he? Desperate enough to take a nighttime gig as a security guard at a family entertainment center called Freddy Fazbear's Pizza. “I’ll take anything,” he tells job counselor Steve (Matthew Lillard).

The run-down and shut-down facility was a once-popular hot spot but now sits empty save for four animatronic mascots, Freddy Fazbear, Bonnie, Chica and Foxy.

Turns out, these mascots are anything but good luck charms. They used to entertain the kids who once flocked to the restaurant, but these days they’re possessed by the spirits of the children who disappeared during Fazbear's glory days.

“The police searched Freddy’s top to bottom,” says enigmatic local police officer Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail). “They never found them. That’s why the place shut down.”

What Vanessa doesn’t know, but Mike is about to find out, at night the mascots come alive, and have set their eyes on a new victim, little, innocent Abby.

Fans of the video game may get an extra charge out of the film’s Easter eggs. Director Emma Tammi provides fan service while the screenplay by Cawthon, Seth Cuddeback and Emma Tammi go hard on the psychological drama.

Determined to figure out who abducted his kid brother Garrett years before, Mike uses his dreams to relive the experience and find new clues. It his attempt to fix the sins of the past, but the drawn-out sequences drag the movie down. Ditto a subplot involving Mike and Abby’s nasty Aunt Jane (Mary Stuart Masterson). Both take valuable screen time away from the main attraction, and that is Abby—Rubio is especially effective as the open-hearted youngster—and her relationship with the creepy mascots. Abby has a connection with them, and also, perhaps, a connection to the abduction of Garrett. That’s where the action is, not in the dreary flashback dream sequences.

“Five Nights at Freddy’s” is being billed as a horror film, but other than a few jump scares, there isn’t much here to make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. Instead, it’s generically atmospheric with little-to-no actual fear factor.

PAIN HUSTLERS: 2 ½ STARS

“Pain Hustlers,” a new true crime dramedy based on the non-fiction book “The Hard Sell” by Evan Hughes, starring Emily Blunt and Chris Evans, and now streaming on Netflix, joins the ever-growing list of movies and television shows that detail big pharma’s culpability in the opioid crisis.

Blunt plays Liza Drake, a broke single-mom to daughter Phoebe (Chloe Coleman). Kicked out of her sister’s garage, where they’d been sleeping for more than a month, Liza is desperate for a job and cash.

During a chance meeting with oily pharmaceutical sales rep Pete Brenner (Chris Evans), she impresses him with her tenacity. Sensing she’d do anything for a buck, he offers her a job, despite her complete lack of qualifications, selling a new, inhalable fentanyl-based pain killer directly to doctors.

“It’s a long-odds lottery buried under a thousand rejections,” he tells her.

To keep the job, all she has to do is get the ball rolling by convincing one doctor to prescribe the drug. Just under the deadline, she lands a whale, the morally compromised Dr. Lydell (Brian d'Arcy James) who hands out the drug to his patients like candy to kids at Halloween.

Liza’s piece of the action is more money than she ever could have imagined.

“You’re not going to make a hundred K this year,” Brenner tells her. “It’s going to be more like six-hundred.”

Drunk on success—and frequent drinking binges—she bends laws and bribes doctors as she chants her mantra, “Own your territory,” to a growing legion of sales reps. But while her bank account swells, so do her doubts, as her conscience becomes her moral compass.

“Pain Hustlers” breathes much of the same air as “Dopesick,” “Painkiller” and the documentary “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed.” Some. But not all. Those stories focused on patients and the personal toll of the opioid epidemic. Conversely, “Pain Hustlers” turns the camera on the sales reps, the pharmaceutical pushers who made fortunes on the misfortune of others.

Liza’s shift from desperation to greed isn’t a particularly fresh take on the rags-to-riches tale, but Blunt works overtime to make her character compelling. Her desire to succeed, to improve her life isn’t simply about the Benjamins, it’s about creating a new start for her daughter. Blunt grounds the movie with ample humanity, anchoring the film’s often over-the-top antics with her earthbound presence.

To its detriment, “Pain Hustlers” has a lighter tone than other recent opioid dramas. It’s not exactly a laugh a minute, but the jocular tone seems at odds with the serious subject matter, particularly in the performances of Evans and Andy Garcia, whose character loses his mind and the audience’s attention midway through.

“Pain Hustlers” attempts a new take on a hot button topic, but, the formulaic execution and uneven tone feels wonky given subject matter.

FREELANCE: 2 STARS

In “Freelance,” a new action comedy now playing in theatres, John Cena plays a man fighting back against a life of quiet desperation, a feeling audiences will be familiar with by the time the end credits roll.

Cena is Mason Pettits, a do gooder trying to find his place in the world. After few miserable years of practicing law left him wanting more—"I thought it would make me feel normal,” he says, “but it made me hate myself.”—he joins the Special Forces. Fulfilled, he says the job allows him to find a much-needed purpose to his life.

That is, until a mission to assassinate dictator Juan Arturo Venegas (Juan Pablo Raba) goes south. Wounded and disillusioned, he leaves behind the life of adventure, and settles down, returning to law and marriage and a safe suburban life.

Bored and unhappy, he accepts a job from Sebastian (Christian Slater), a former Special Forces colleague now running Contractual Defense Industries, a one stop shop-and-shoot mercenary business.

“We sell security,” he says.

The job sounds simple but there is a catch. He will accompany journalist Claire Wellington (Alison Brie) to South America and keep her safe as she interviews Juan Arturo Venegas, the very dictator at the heart of the mission that ended Pettits’s Special Forces career.

“Freelance” is the kind of movie that once gathered dust in direct-to-DVD bins at Blockbuster.

Not even the considerable charm of the leads, Cena and Brie, can overcome the generic action, the weird shifts in tone from bloody gun battles to light comedy, a forgettable villain (played by the usually reliable Marton Csokas) and a goofy dictator who, on one hand speaks about the exploitation of poor countries by corrupt international corporations, while on the other delivering silly lines like, “I believe when one encounters danger, one must sing to it.”

With very few exceptions, “Freelance” feels very been-there-done-that, as if director Pierre Morel tried to pay tribute to the direct-to-DVD genre, but forgot to bring the fun.