“Half of you were recruited from malls because you’re a bunch of f - -king gamers,” cracks an official (Bruce Greenwood) running a drone-pilot program in “Good Kill,” which is set in 2010 and takes a brutally dark look at the military’s burgeoning business of remote combat. Today, he says, “war is a first-person shooter.”
Director Andrew Niccol (“The Host”) reteams with Ethan Hawke, star of his first (and best) film, “Gattaca,” with Hawke taking the role of a fighter pilot-turned-armchair assassin. Hawke’s Tom Egan, a loyal soldier, is increasingly disturbed by his orders to target and destroy groups in Afghanistan and Yemen who meet vague requirements of suspicious behavior, especially when the CIA steps in and begins dictating off-the-books ops. His co-pilot, Vera (Zoë Kravitz), is equally uneasy but new enough to the job that she’s not fraying as visibly.
The contrast between the stark drone-pilot trailer and Tom’s commute home through the gaudily American trappings of Las Vegas is pointed.
Off-duty in his prefab desert house, Tom’s relations with his wife (January Jones) and kids are frosty and distant; he finds solace in booze and loud music, and dreams of flying an actual plane again.
Niccol takes a thought-provoking look at the less obvious psychological trauma inflicted on those tasked with ending lives halfway across the world. Throwing in a dig at the Obama administration (“They give out Nobel prizes for this s - - t now?”), his script takes care to present the opposition as well: “It’s a vicious cycle. It doesn’t matter who made it vicious. You think if we stop killing them they’ll stop killing us?”
The insidiously sedentary and repetitive nature of drone warfare is what, unfortunately, makes Niccol’s film drag in places. Tom’s frustration and anger build, but each day visibly looks a lot like the next: Sit down, arm crosshairs, pull trigger, go home and drink, repeat. Jones has a mostly thankless role as (once again) an ignored wife, trying and failing to get through to her faltering husband.
Tom’s anguish is best illustrated when accompanied by a visual flashback, as he describes having to bomb a suspect along with his sleeping family, then being ordered to follow it up by bombing their funeral, too. “This is my job,” he says, helplessly. And helpless is how I felt watching it. Niccol’s film may not be perfect, but it shines a light on a subject many viewers will know vaguely by name — and not much more.