Good Kill
A potentially thought-provoking modern war film is undermined by too many familiar tropes.
It is not
very often that one comes across a war film set in Las Vegas. But Andrew Niccol’s
Good Kill is just such an animal.
Ethan Hawke plays Major Thomas Egan, a drone pilot who kills Taliban tribesmen
from a Portacabin in Nevada. The bare bones of the plot – culled from real-life
events – are eye-opening. Albeit ten thousand miles from his prey, Egan – a
former fighter pilot – kisses his bored, gorgeous wife goodbye in the morning and
then drives to the local airbase. There, he enters a cabin with the legend “You
Are Now Leaving the USA” pinned to the door and slumps down behind his console.
And then, in the comfort of complete anonymity, he orchestrates the bombs that
destroy the ‘enemy’ in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen. For Egan, though, it is
all too easy a combat zone and not without its psychological repercussions:
he’s none too happy with the collateral damage…
It is
unfortunate that Good Kill, training
the ethics of American military action in its crosshairs, arrives so soon after
American Sniper. Here again we have a
military marriage in crisis – with the beautiful wife trying to reach out to her
troubled, retiring soldier – and again the husband is a sniper, albeit more of
the gamer variety. But unlike Clint Eastwood’s award-laden, box-office
behemoth, Good Kill is rife with clichés.
There is the surprisingly sexy co-pilot (Zoë Kravitz – daughter of Lenny), the demonization
of the enemy (one Taliban fighter is seen to repeatedly rape the same woman)
and the resource to alcohol for the morally conflicted hero. Even so, the film
is not afraid to shy away from controversy. As one Top Gun-esque jock proclaims: “It’s easier to kill people than to
capture them. If you capture them, you then have to torture them.”
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Ethan Hawke, January Jones, Zoë
Kravitz, Jake Abel, Bruce Greenwood, Peter Coyote.
Dir Andrew Niccol, Pro Andrew Niccol, Mark Amin, Nicolas Chartier and Zev Foreman, Screenplay Andrew Niccol, Ph Amir Mokri, Pro Des Guy Barnes, Ed Zach
Staenberg, Music Christophe Beck, Costumes Lisa Jensen.
Voltage Pictures/Sobini Films-Arrow Film Distributors
102 mins. USA. 2014. Rel: 10 April 2015. Cert. 15.