I don't quite know what to make of this film David Fincher chose to make right after the brilliant period drama that was *Mank*. For an acclaimed filmmaker who just so impressively stepped out of his comfort zone and evolved his craft, this one feels regressive and also kinda derivative, mostly of the director's own early work but also echoing Melville's *Le Samourai* and *Le Cercle Rouge* Seijun Suzuki's *Branded To Kill*, Jim Jarmusch's *Ghost Dog* and *The Limits Of Control* or Lynne Ramsay's *You Were Never Really Here*. Unlike any of these and their varying layers of meaning, this one rings hollow to me though. Especially the first half comes across as ridiculously cliched in its over-reliance on and rehash of some Tyler Durden-esque entry-level nihilist stoner philosophy spiked with lone-wolf warrior bushido rethoric, a superficial semblance of meaning that never amounts to more than a cool pose in a film that strikes me as a horribly dated throwback to the power fantasies of a gen-x wounded sense of masculinity. It's a kind of cinema that feels stuck in early adulthood to me. Guess what, back when that kinda was the hipster zeitgeist, i was really into The Smiths too. Everybody was, really. In the best case i can't help but cynically assume this is a cash-grab ticking-all-the-boxes movie made to appeal to the nostalgia of those who came of age in the nineties and have refused to emotionally mature after that. In the worst case, it comes across like the wet-dream power fantasy of some red-pilled gamergate MAGA 4chan edgelord type. In a way it resembles the hypermasculine 2000s noir cool of *Sin City*, another terribly dated work of macho fanservice that thankfully lost much of its place in our culture. Being a Fincher flick after all, it's incredibly watchable, gorgeously shot and exquisitely paced. It has a detached and paradoxical kind of quality akin to your average Brian De Palma thriller as there's plenty of craft to admire but on an emotional and intellectual level, i can't help but feel belittled by it.