Sometimes films are made with the best of intentions but,
for whatever reason, just end up being bad examples of whatever they were
trying to portray. This commonly happens
with political message films, where the writers can become so invested in
conveying an ideology that they forego creating a worthwhile narrative or
characters in order to carry the message in an entertaining way. Good
Kill is a film with the noblest of intentions, but it bungles so many very
basic elements of compelling storytelling that it just cannot be considered a
good film.
The political purpose of this actually underpublicized film
is to bring awareness to drone strikes, how they affect the populations they
survey and kill, and how they cause a unique form of PTSD for soldiers here in
the United States. Enter Major Thomas Egan
(Ethan Hawke), a former pilot who has been assigned to a Nevada base where he
clocks in every day to sit at a desk and control a drone over Afghanistan. What follows from that basic premise is a
fairly standard tale of how PTSD affects those who suffer from it and how it
affects their loves ones, but it is told only about as effectively as in American Sniper, perhaps even less
adequately so.
The main problem is that this film is devoid of identifiable
characters. Nobody feels like a real
human being, least of all Hawke who, despite being a decent actor, just can’t
convincingly pull off dead serious roles that ask him to be completely devoid
of levity. Nearly every other character is
nothing more than a speechifying mouthpiece of writer-director Andrew Niccol’s
views on drone strikes and the military complex that allows them to continue to
accept collateral damage in the name of stopping terrorism. The fact that I may agree with these points
doesn’t make the story any more compelling; the actors are just props to spout
lines that spin a particular political sentiment, yet don’t communicate
anything more than that. The only
exception seems to come in the form of January Jones as Major Egan’s wife, yet she
seems to be perpetually stuck playing Mad
Men’s Betty Draper with less and less effectiveness as the years wear on.
Even if one were to take the film’s political message as de facto good writing, the ending completely sabotages the consistency of the ideology
as presented up until that point. I
think this subtext was probably entirely inadvertent, but the final moments of
the film involve Major Egan going off assignment to kill a target that he does
not have permission to kill, but he feels morally justified in doing so given
some of the atrocities he watched his victim perpetrate. This carries the unfortunate implication that
sometimes drone strikes can be justified, and what feels like it was intended
to act as a protagonist’s cathartic climactic moment only ends up confusing the
tentpole theme that kept the whole story aloft.
Good Kill is a
really unfortunate film because it seems to have a lot of potential in its
premise and its ideological stance. But
a film needs to be more than just an ideological stance. To now make a contrast to American Sniper, whereas that film was
so devoid of ideology as to be soulless, this film sacrificed its characters
and plot upon the alter of ideology.
Neither makes for a good film; as always, there needs to be balance and
moderation in narrative writing, but especially so in political drama.
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