If you're excited by the war on terror and want to be lectured on the morality of the drone war circa 2010 then you might enjoy this movie but only if you have a high tolerance for boredom. This movie has the soldier's stereotypical messy home life, stereotypical moral dilemmas, stereotypical PTSD and stereotypical problems with self-medication. I've liked January Jones' acting in other roles but in this role she is devoid of sincerity. Will Ethan Hawke;s character rebel from his immoral assignment? Will his marriage survive? Will he get together with the hot enlisted woman? So many questions we don't care about.

Major Thomas Egan (Ethan Hawke) is a F-16 pilot married to Molly (January Jones) with two kids. He is currently flying drones and going home to his family. He would like to go back to flying F-16s but the Air Force is changing. He is disconnected from his wife. His commander Lt. Colonel Jack Johns (Bruce Greenwood) bemoans the lost of real flying and the recruiting of video game playing kids. They are put under the command of a CIA controller only as a voice over the phone. New airman Vera Suarez (Zoë Kravitz) starts questioning the ethics of the missions. The constant moral ambiguity drives Thomas into a decline.This is a movie about one moral ambiguity of war. It's not that subtle. Ethan Hawke delivers a solid performance. At the end of the day, he's killing people whether he's flying a drone or flying a fighter jet. The movie advocates against something that may not be agreeable to all audiences. It's not a great enough film to transcend that divide.

What I thought was interesting is the insight the movie offers on the war through drones: I think this is the first time a war movie depicts this way of fighting a war, something looking more like a video game than the dirty reality of ground-fight. So I thought the movie was very insightful, providing a clear point of view on both the ethics of such a war and the personal impact on individuals. What the film does is to take you into the virtual reality of a war where who pulls the trigger is in a bunker in Vegas and the bullet hit someone in Afghanistan; it is a virtual reality where the boundary between what is war and what is a sheer crime becomes more and more blurred, where war on terror gives the cover to commit illegal actions. At the same time, I felt the movie did not go beyond scratching the surface of the issue, it got kind of repetitive and it tried to solve the tension built throughout the whole story with a crappy happy end...

In this review I will try to explain why I left a 3 star rating & I am pretty sure many will disagree with me because the movie scored 9/10 on many categories. However, sometimes small flaws discredit the whole movie & I am not talking about the typical mistakes we always find on many movies. I give the producer 9/10, director 9/10, lead 9/10, casting 8/10 & a 1/10 for screenplay. The talented writer of this movie fell for the classic self delusion many great directors/writers fall for. They start their careers with the 3 great movies they always thought off & easily write it down & direct it. In this case Gattaca, Truman Show & Lord of War all three were masterpieces written by Andrew Niccol. All shared a hyper sensationalist touch & an eye into a world we did know, usually a plot we can't examine so the mistakes we saw there didn't ruin the movie & the writer happened to have more information about the subject in matter. Forward a decade into Good Kill, you open up to a perfect movie, a very interesting topic, great casting & perfect picture, but the big flaw becomes apparent as we go throw the movie you feel that the writer has no clue about Vegas or the USAF in many spoilers that you have to watch. The fulcrum of the movie is our grounded pilot who wants to get back into his F-16, now part of a 4 man (1 lady & 3 men) team sending drones after terrorists. Each his own individual perspective of their part in this war. The ex pilot share a superficial dislike of the drone war, as you will find out for different reasons & you should know the rest. As our USAF F16 grounded pilot tells us how he misses landing on Aircraft carriers, I lost interests & started noticing that the script must have been written to meet some deadline...another once great master past his prime