Good Kill

Good Kill (15)

USA 2014  100 mins  Dir: Andrew Niccol  Starring: Ethan Hawke, January Jones, Zoë Kravitz, Jake Abel, Bruce Greenwood 

“How’s the war on terror going?” asks a cop of US Air Force fighter pilot Matt Egan (Hawke). “Kinda like your war on drugs,” he replies. Writer/director Andrew Niccol’s companion piece to his more satirical Lord of War bristles with such sharply scripted dialogue, much of it gifted to Bruce Greenwood as Egan’s cynical yet by-the-book commanding officer, Lt. Colonel Johns. Anyone playing combat veteran cliché bingo will be delighted by the scene where Egan shouts at his wife and punches a mirror, and some of the supporting characters are somewhat underwritten, but at its heart this is a piercing exploration of the dehumanising effects of high-tech warfare.

Egan’s got six tours of duty under his belt, which also makes him a dinosaur who’s mistaken for a Top Gun fantasist in fancy dress. He itches to get back in the air and shoot up some bad guy ass in manly traditional combat. But as Johns explains to raw recruits, the US public won’t stand for American boys being blown up or captured and beheaded on foreign soil any more. That’s why the military is now recruiting gamers from the malls. Frustrated Egan finds himself sitting alongside them in an eerily silent, airless mobile shipping container on the outskirts of Las Vegas, ‘piloting’ a drone that rains death upon suspected Taliban militants thousands of miles away in Afghanistan. Naturally, his wife Molly (Jones) is delighted that he’s keeping America safe from evildoers at no danger to himself and can now drive home for family barbecues after a hard day’s bombing. Egan does his job with due professionalism, if no great enthusiasm, until the rules of engagement are changed as the CIA starts to call the shots. Henceforth, they won’t be targeting specific individuals in this Xbox war but “patterns of behaviour”. This is a euphemism blowing up groups of people, including ‘non-combatants’, and waiting a few minutes for a ‘follow-up’ (i.e. blowing up those who come to collect what’s left of the dead from the rubble). New recruit and unit conscience Suarez (Kravitz) begins to wonder aloud how this distinguishes the US military from the terrorists.

You can tell a guy is suffering from a serious ethical dilemma when he can’t even concentrate on having sex with Betty from Mad Men. Hawke gives it plenty of brittle, pent-up fury in the lead role, (“What happens when he gets angry?” Molly is asked. “He gets more quiet,” she replies), making Egan a more rounded character than some of the supporting two-dimensional gung-ho bozos. Peter Coyote also delivers a chilling performance as the cold, disembodied, insistent voice of Langley. Amir Morki’s superb cinematography includes many an aerial view of the bland, regimented Las Vegas suburbs, reminding us that these are carved out of the desert just like those target villages thousands of miles away. Perhaps wisely, Niccol makes it clear at the outset that this is a period piece set in 2010 when no one had heard of ISIS. He also makes no attempt to disguise where his sympathies lie, but still delivers a more subtle, nuanced and provocative war film than Clint Eastwood’s bone-headed American Sniper.