It is always exciting when Andrew Niccol makes a new feature. He is a smart, ambitious filmmaker. Sometimes he swings for the fences with big sci-fi projects like IN TIME and THE HOST and fails to connect. But Niccol teams up again with Ethan Hawke with whom he made his two best films, GATTACA and LORD OF WAR, and hits a home run with GOOD KILL.

 

This may be the quietest war picture I have ever seen, but it is still incredibly effective. Witnessing the horrors of war may even be more effective when it is deadly quiet. GOOD KILL deals with the war in Afghanistan in 2010 as it is being fought remotely from a base in Las Vegas. Each day Major Thomas Egan played by Ethan Hawke reports to work where he pilots a drone and "prosecutes" targets in Afghanistan. He is an Air Force pilot who desperately misses the thrill of flying an aircraft and feels that he no longer has any skin in the game. Because he is an excellent pilot, he is particularly good at piloting the drone and deadly accurate at hitting his targets. Although there is a new generation of recruits who have more experience with videogames than with piloting jets in a war zone.

 

We live in a time when technology is advancing much faster than we are able to predict or understand its ramifications. Typically when men and women go to war, they are away from their families and loved ones for months if not years at a time. So there is some separation between what they do at war from them interacting with their families. But no one knows what it does to a person to essentially report to a nine to five job where they kill human beings all day, then go home and have dinner with their wife and kids. It clearly takes a toll on Tommy in GOOD KILL and when he finally opens up and tells his wife about his day at work, it is devastating.

 

Ethan Hawke anchors the picture and gives a very quiet, internal performance. A character even comments to his wife at a barbecue about how quiet he is. She asks what he is like when he gets upset and his wife says he get quieter. Hawke plays this very well. He is a good family man, but he does not know how to come home to his family after work each day and finds some comfort in a bottle, though it is only a matter of time until that quiet rage comes to the surface.

 

January Jones is stunning to look at but she usually has the charisma of a block of wood. Surprisingly here she is as natural as I have ever seen her and she plays well opposite Hawke.

 

The amazing Bruce Greenwood steals virtually every scene as Colonel Johns. He has some great speeches and briefings in the picture where he commands the screen, but he also brings a lot of humor to the story. His rapport with Hawke is excellent. You can never have enough Bruce Greenwood in your movie.

 

Zoe Kravitz is typically a one note performer and that one note is dull. I have yet to see her add anything to a picture with her performance and I'm never thrilled to see her name on a cast list. In GOOD KILL, she is very natural and actually emotes. Her Airman Suarez goes through a range of emotions and while she is normally buttoned up in a flight suit, she even gets to cut loose at a club with her team and show her sexy, seductive side. It's a good side. I assume Director Niccol is responsible for getting such good work out of both Jones and Kravitz.

 

The great Peter Coyote plays the voice of Langley when Colonel Johns' team is tasked with carrying out a series of C.I.A. missions that have much different rules than they are used to. They take civilian collateral damage much less seriously and justify each choice weighed against the evil that their targets will do. At one point, Suarez asks if they just committed a war crime. It is an excellent question. But it is during these scenes where the film shows its major flaw. During the missions, when Langley is questioned he gives very long explanations justifying his orders. I assume that Niccol wanted to get these justifications into the picture somewhere, but they just do not ring true in this context. In reality, I would imagine that Langley would give an order and expect it to be executed immediately. I don't think they would continually justify each order especially when time is a factor. These justifications may have played better in either a briefing session or a debrief after the fact. 

 

While this is a very different kind of warfare, one in which our soldiers are halfway across the world and as such in no physical danger, the missions are still often a white knuckle affair as they perform surveillance and track targets. Niccol does an excellent job of building tension in these sequences. And he also gives voice to the members of the team, all of whom carry out their duties but have very different opinions about it.

 

GOOD KILL is one of a handful of great films that I have seen so far in 2015. In a perfect world everyone who saw AMERICAN SNIPER would see GOOD KILL. But as this picture makes very clear, it's not a perfect world.