In a country in which individualism sometimes seems to blot out all other values, it was perhaps inevitable that our movie screens were for so long dominated by solemn, solitary Western stars. During the first half of the last century, audiences embraced the meanness of John Wayne, the pinched reserve of Randolph Scott, the enigmatic ambivalence of Clint Eastwood, and the inscrutable heroism of Alan Ladd. The public understood that these men’s antisocial qualities were inseparable from their guts and professionalism.

We live in a different country nowadays, and, Yellowstone and its offspring notwithstanding, we don’t have much of an appetite for Westerns. Yet audiences still hunger for hermetic men of action. Instead of the Western, though, these figures are likely to be encountered in the lone assassin movie, a distinct genre that includes masterpieces such as The Day of the Jackal, Le Samourai, and The Professional, as well as far less distinguished films, including John Wick and Bullet Train — the very existence of which nonetheless attests to the longevity of the form.

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Now comes David Fincher with his own entry in the lone assassin movie, the new Netflix release The Killer. What took Fincher so long to make a movie about a man with a gun lying in wait? Few directors are better equipped to capture the cool, unemotional core of this genre. From his sophomore film Seven through his masterpiece Zodiac, Fincher has distinguished himself with his measured, highly stylized approach to horrifying subject matter.

The man with a gun in question is Michael Fassbender, who, in the tradition of his fatalistic forebears, is perhaps the most unexpressive major actor of our time. Yet, like the film itself, this is a case of too much of a good thing. When Fassbender shares the screen with a succession of engaging, interesting performers — among them Charles Parnell, Tilda Swinton, and Arliss Howard — one has the sense that they are acting and he is merely smirking, sulking, brooding, or killing time until, well, his next kill.

Despite having been adapted from the not-so-promising material of a French comic book, The Killer begins rather promisingly. The setting is Paris, a bit of a predictable choice for a lone assassin flick. But rest assured, the film will send our titular character to far more exotic locales in due time. For now, the Killer has stationed himself in a WeWork space conveniently located across the street from a luxurious hotel. To make sure the joke lands, the WeWork space is identified as such multiple times. It’s my solemn duty to report that this is one of numerous contemporary pop culture references used by screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker (Seven) to assure moviegoers that we are not watching a relic. Early in his voice-over narration, the Killer refers to the inadequacy of Airbnb rentals for his purposes, the number of McDonald’s restaurants in Paris, and the fact that he has put in his “10,000 hours” on the job — the latter an only slightly dated reference to the self-help regimen of Malcolm Gladwell. (Remember him?)

This is all amusing enough until we realize that the Killer’s voice-over is not just a kind of getting-to-know-you tool used in the opening scenes. No, the Killer aims to kill us with his uninflected narration throughout the whole movie. He tells us again and again (and again) about his line of work, its pitfalls, its risks, its pleasures, and its miseries. We are listening to all of this as we are ostensibly watching the movie, which suggests a deep uneasiness on the part of the filmmakers with the movie itself. Did they not think that the opening assassination scene was compelling enough to observe as it really would have happened, that is, in silence?

If so, they were sadly right: The Killer looks and looks and looks some more at his target in that hotel room, the curtains to which are inexplicably (and, from a dramatic plausibility perspective, inexcusably) left open. Finally, he fires. But instead of hitting his target, he mistakenly kills his target’s companion for the evening, a woman in a dominatrix outfit. The voice-over does not merely fail to distract from this underwhelming sequence, but it also raises other questions. For example, if the Killer is as good as he keeps telling us he is, why on earth would he miss such an easy shot?

Perhaps not wanting the audience to linger on such questions, Fincher quickly relocates the action to the Dominican Republic, where the Killer is shocked to learn that his girlfriend Magdala (Sophie Charlotte) has been beaten up by various sordid types unhappy with his failure to deliver on his last job. From there, the film seems to be channeling the spirit of Kill Bill more than The Day of the Jackal. The Killer proceeds to stalk and confront assorted colleagues in the assassination biz.

All the while, the Killer talks a blue streak — not to any of his victims, of course, but to us poor victims in the audience. Again, one has the impression that the constant stream of narration is compensation for the dull and unoriginal setups. Surely, there are more clever ways to show off the Killer’s purported ingenuity than by having him place a glass on a hotel doorknob to warn of intruders or by having him disguise himself as a garbage man to gain entrance into a lawyer’s office. This is bush-league stuff next to, say, Max von Sydow in Three Days of the Condor. Strangely, Fincher only seems to wake up during a well-choreographed extended fight scene with a fellow assassin and his pit bull, but the scene is antithetical to the lone assassin movie form: waiting and plotting are supposed to define this genre, not blood and guts.

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The ending is a complete disappointment: A now barefoot and (by all appearances) Tommy Bahama-outfitted Killer, having done his deeds, cozies up beside his girlfriend for a life of — what? Contentment? Smoothies by the beach? Couldn’t Fincher have at least inserted a shot of a figure walking up behind the loving couple with a gun? Why not give us some sense of the danger in the life of a retired assassin?

Fincher has made a film in an honorable and long-lasting cinematic tradition, one for which his past triumphs made him a natural fit. But as written by Walker and played by Fassbender, this assassin is not so much a lone wolf as a lame wolf — one who can’t help baying at the moon in the form of bromides, witticisms, and statements of principle.

Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.