Good Kill
(2014)
Andrew Niccol’s latest might be viewed as presenting the
flipside to the earnest and venerable combatant approach of Eastwood’s American Sniper. Unfortunately, while Good Kill has a clear moral and
political point of view, in contrast to Eastwood’s contextual ambivalence, it is
every bit as clumsy in its storytelling.
Niccol has a knack for picking provocative subject matter,
but his ability to show restraint and finesse in exploring these ideas has
generally been patchy. He comes up short in Gattaca
(eugenics) Lord of War (the arms
trade), S1m0ne (the monster media
machine) and In Time (the haves and
have nots). Good Kill knows all the
arguments about drone warfare. It even has Colonel Johns (Bruce Greenwood,
gluing the film together) rehearsing them in an entirely unsubtle manner at
every opportunity (“Make no mistake about
it, this ain’t Playstation. We are killing people”).
Co-pilot Suarez (Zoe
Kravitz) inhabits the similarly obvious conscience role (the lily-livered
liberal who even delivers the immortal “I
didn’t sign up for this”) in response to her red-bloodedly patriotic colleagues
Zimmer (Jake Abel) and Christie (Dylan Kenin). And then there’s becalmed Major
Tom Egan (Ethan Hawke, making his third picture with Niccol), the
on-the-surface rock but slowly-revealed burnt out. His moral fragmentation
comes somewhere in the middle, as the ex “proper” pilot who just wants to get
back in the cockpit of a fighter (“I
don’t know what I am doing, but it’s not flying”).
Niccol makes some curious and ham-fisted choices. He’s keen
to emphasise gradations of justification that don’t really fly (so to speak).
At one end of the scale is CIA Langley (voiced by an unseen Peter Coyote), full
of studied rhetoric but basically “collateral damaged be damned”. Anyone,
anywhere in the Middle East may end up as an unfortunate casualty in the
mission to eradicate the enemy. Women, children, funeral mourners, people
gathered talking on a dusty road. At least the military has some standards in
comparison, Niccol is saying. At least they
(as in Colonel Johns) agonise over their actions and go home knowing their
intentions were good (except those, like Zimmer and Christie who just want to
kill anyone and everyone over there, lest they come over there and destroy
everything America stands for).
On the far end is the actual “good kill”. At the climax,
Egan, already demoted for purposefully fouling up a Langley mission, locks
himself in the control centre and blows up the Afghan rapist who has been
offending his and his fellow pilots’ sensibilities throughout (even Zimmer averts his eyes, so what this
guy is doing really is bad). It’s a triumphant moment. Egan has done right.
Killed someone who really deserved it. Has he? That seems to be the message.
Niccol even has the cynicism to pull out a particularly queasy moment of tension
where Egan might have accidentally killed the rape victim too. But no, she’s
okay. Phew. It might have served the message of the movie better if she had
died. Instead Niccol encourages false uplift in a conclusion that is
shamelessly emotionally manipulative.
It also makes the picture, hardly a model of restraint in
the first place, seem all the more jarring and obvious in retrospect. The varied
jargon used to distance the perpetrator from unprovoked acts of aggression
(pre-emptive self defence is a particularly deceitful item), and avoid confessing
to what is actually being ordered, initially seems quite piercing but becomes much
less so as the picture progresses.
Egan hits the bottle to like a dyed in the
wool alcoholic but appears completely functional and quits with nary a
withdrawal symptom. His home life dynamic (January Jones as his wife, in a big
screen career that suggests her agent has something against her) is entirely
clichéd, but it’s Hawke who is most problematic. He’s the stoic aviator-shades
wearing seasoned serviceman, but he still carries the nervy air of his Todd
Anderson from Dead Poets Society,
only now slightly more desiccated.
Which isn’t to say the picture isn’t engaging. It is to be
respected for being more economically told and more focussed than American Sniper. But it’s ultimately no
more laudable. There is one aspect where Niccol wholly succeeds, and that’s the
incongruity of the Vegas milieu from which these drone missions are fought. He
convincingly portrays a life that is both repetitive and banal and psychologically and emotionally
wearing. The pilots enter shipping crates in an expanse of sun-drenched tarmac for
each shift, transported to a warzone thousands of miles away. They emerge into
the calm of the Las Vegas desert, and then drive home to deceptively normal
lives.
This dissonance is palpable, and much more resonant than any of the verbalised
arguments for and against in carrying the idea and question of just what this
is. Killing with impunity, from the safety of, and divorce from, the
battlefield. This might be presented as merely the latest stage in an
incremental shift that has been occurring ever since the invention of the bow
and arrow but, the more removed and detached the capability becomes (and the
more casually civilian fatalities are brushed off), the less easy it is to
frame an argument that satisfies such methods (be it legal war or illegal “but
justifiable” incursion).
Niccol laces occasional moments of effective humour through
the picture (“I blew away six Taliban in
Pakistan today and now I’m going home to barbecue”, Egan tells a cashier; “Why do wear flight suits?” he asks
Johns, genuinely baffled; at one point Zimmer opines that the reason they aim
to kill so many Afghanis is that the alternative of torturing them would cost too
much), but one can’t help think the surreality of this environment would have
been better served by the kind of outright irreverence shown by Gregor Jordan
in Buffalo Soldiers. Either that, or
stripped right down to a minimal level, allowing the absurd ambience to do the
talking rather than characters’ overstated interactions. Good Kill frequently feels thin and didactic despite a surfeit of ripe
material to explore.
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