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The title of writer/director Andrew Niccol’s “Good Kill” (2013) refers to the prosaic confirmation issued by Air Force Major Tommy Egan (Ethan Hawke) each time he successfully terminates a confirmed target from above. He is not in a jetfighter when he does this, though, but piloting a drone from a desk chair in an air-conditioned cubicle outside Las Vegas thousands of miles away from America’s war on terror. Tommy pines for action in a real plane, asking his commanding officer, Lt. Col. Jack Johns (Bruce Greenwood), for reassignment despite being able to go home each night to his wife Molly (January Jones) and two kids. Whether dropping a bomb from an actual plane is more ethically justifiable than doing so via drone is glossed over, just as the absence of adrenaline in a desk chair as opposed to an ejector seat is never really addressed at all, illustrating “Good Kill’s” troubling blind spots. No, the core of “Good Kill” is drone warfare corroding Egan’s humanity and Hawke is up to the task. Normally such a lively, conversational actor, he reduces himself down to virtually nothing, echoing his own pale white skin to create something like a vampire who can be out in the bright Nevada sun.
As Egan and Johns integrate a new junior officer, Vera Suarez (Zoë Kravitz), into their team, so, too must they deal with increasingly morally ambiguous orders that are now being dispensed directly from the CIA (embodied in the voice of Peter Coyote), provoking Egan to emotionally shut down even more around his wife and drink heavily. These are familiar dramatic devices and, unfortunately, Niccol teases nothing new from them, the otherwise deliberately mechanical feel of his aesthetic trickling down in the worst way to his narrative. What’s more, his dialogue, especially between Egan and his colleagues, is never baked into that drama, tending more toward blatant point-counterpoint, as if we are watching a public affairs talk show discussing drone warfare. Greenwood, at least, in delivering a few monologues existing as much for our benefit as they do for those under the command of his character animates them with a kind of just-following-orders contempt that feels, at least, like something real rather than didactic points via the filmmaker.
It’s clear from several lines of dialogue that Niccol wants to demonstrate the muddle between drone warfare and video games, but then, that’s the problem, his script literally saying it only underlines how his filmmaking fails to evoke it. Tommy’s console, desk chair, and joystick look similar to a video game set-up, yes, but beyond that, “Good Kill” never approximates so-called game feel, it never blurs the lines between life in the room and the one on the screen. As if afraid of going too far or his message being misconstrued, Niccol refuses to reduce the onscreen killing to the point where we don’t feel anything at all.
