Review of Good Kill (2015) by Manny C — 01 Jun 2015

Picture this: you're lying comfortably somewhere out of harm's way, you have a remote with a button that can send a drone to bomb any enemy of your country into oblivion. Collateral damage is not a consideration. That's the premise of Good Kill, a potent, incendiary provocation that gnaws at you with tough questions. Ethan Hawke is all kinds of good as Tom Egan, a former fighter pilot in Iraq now assigned to a base near Las Vegas where he's tasked by his CO (a terrific Bruce Greenwood) to exact destruction upon the Taliban, personal consequences be damned. Unless of course you have an actual conscience like most people.

Writer-director Andrew Niccol, who previously collaborated with Hawke for the provocative Gattaca, loads his premise to the brim. You have Tom's troubled relationship with his wife (a wonderful January Jones) and their children. There are his conflicted feelings about President Obama's drone program. Tom doesn't do a lot of talking, much of the talk comes from his co-pilot (Zoe Kravitz). And then there's the whole issue of covert surveillance and modern warfare that posits the possible scenario that gamers will be the death pilots of tomorrow, and killing itself may lose its moral sting. Niccol takes broad strokes. He's definitely pushing hard, but tough to hate on a film that seeks to take on weighty issues and plumb the toll it can have on those engaged in morally questionable actions.