Film Review: Good Kill (dir by Andrew Niccol)

Posted on June 2, 2015 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Good Kill is an angry film that is somewhat grounded by a strong lead performance from Ethan Hawke. Hawke was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in Boyhood and … well, he probably won’t be nominated for anything for Good Kill. The film’s coming out too early in the year and it’s not really a crowd-pleasing Oscar movie. It’s too angry and polemical but still, Ethan Hawke gives an excellent performance.

Hawke plays Thomas Egan, an air force pilot who, after serving 6 tours in Afghanistan, is reassigned to pilot drones from a base in Las Vegas. For 12 hours a day, Egan sits in a cramped room where he and three other pilots spend their time staring at video monitors and observing people going about their lives on the other side of the world. Occasionally, a phone rings and they are given orders by a never seen CIA supervisor. All Egan has to do is push a button and, in just ten seconds, he can blow up a stranger 7,000 miles away.

Of course, it’s not just the targets who get blown up. Anyone unlucky enough to be standing nearby ends up getting blown up as well, which is something that Egan’s commanding officer (Bruce Greenwood) insists is a regretful but acceptable consequence of fighting the War of Terror. Except, of course, nobody’s quite sure that they’re actually blowing up terrorists. Instead, often times, it’s a matter of guesswork. People are blown up because they could be terrorists, not because they definitely are.

While most of the members of Egan’s unit are unconcerned about the ethics or the legalities of drone warfare, Vera Suarez (Zoe Kravitz) is an exception. She worries that they’re just creating more terrorists. (And yet, interestingly enough, she still follows orders whenever she’s told to blow someone up.) Egan is troubled by the implications of what he’s doing but, for the most part, he keeps his feelings to himself.

From the beginning, the tightly wound Egan struggles with the pressure of being a drone pilot. After spending half of the day killing strangers who may or may not be terrorists, Egan finds it difficult to spend the rest of the day with his wife (January Jones) and his children. Slowly but surely, cracks start to appear on Egan’s facade. He starts drinking. He drives recklessly. He yells at his family. He grows paranoid about the neighbors. When a cop asks him how the War on Terror is going, Egan smirks and replies that it’s going as well as the War on Drugs…

Even though I agreed, for the most part, with everything that the film had to say, I still found it to be incredibly heavy-handed. There is something to be said for subtlety and Good Kill is definitely not a subtle movie. Rabidly anti-military audiences will enjoy having their own prejudices confirmed but, with everyone other than Egan and Vera being portrayed as being bloodthirsty and ignorant, you can be sure that this film won’t change any minds. Politically, this a political film that’s not going to make a bit of difference.

At the same time, there is an interesting subtext running through the film. During the 12 hours that Egan spends in that room, he essentially ceases to be a human being and becomes an extension of that drone. Both literally and figuratively, he becomes a part of the war machine. Just imagine if a director like David Cronenberg had handled this material. Director Anrew Niccol briefly touches on the Cronenbergian aspects of the story but, in the end, he gets too bogged down in all of the speeches.

The problem with political films like Good Kill is that they often feel very artificial and that’s why you’re thankful for Ethan Hawke’s performance. Hawke gives a performance of such raw power that he cuts through all of the polemical bullshit. The film is nearly smothered under the director’s heavy hand but Hawke breathes it back to life. Hawke’s performance brings much needed authenticity to Good Kill and, as a result, he elevates the entire film.

Quickie Review: Return of the Living Dead 5: Rave to the Grave (dir. by Ellory Elkayem)

Posted on February 12, 2011 by Arleigh

There’s not much to say about Return of the Living Dead 5: Rave to the Grave other than it’s actually worse than the movie before it. Return of the Living Dead 4: Necropolis was really bad and not in the so bad it’s funny. What had been a cult horror franchise which had fun with the zombie genre in addition to putting some genuine scares in people, these last two Return of the Living Dead films should pretty much kill the franchise just when the zombie revival is still going on strong.

Ellory Elkayem does directing duty for this fifth installment. He also directed the fourth film. I had thought that not everything should be laid at Elkayem’s feet when it came to who to blame for the lackluster and awful film that was Necropolis, but after sitting through Rave to the Grave I have to say that whatever good will Ellory Elkayem built up with his funny take on the giant creature feature, Eight-Legged Freaks, has been wasted with his back-to-back filming of Necropolis and Rave to the Grave. Elkayem films both films one after the other and I am going to assume this was more to save on the budget than any sort of continuity with the actors hired to play recurring roles. If saving money was the main reason then it sure didn’t look like it. Except for a few hero-zombie (zombies given more screentime than most thus given a better make-up effect) scenes the film clearly shows it’s ultra low-budget pedrigree. I don’t have problems with low-budget horror movies as long as there’s a sense of energy and enjoyment by those making it, but neither Necropolis and Rave to the Grave showed any one of the two.

Rave to the Grave occurs one year after the events of Necropolis and the teenage survivors of that film have now graduated and attending college. The film never really makes it clear if they’re in back in the U.S. attending college or still in Eastern Europe where the previous film was set. Either way the survivors from the previous film seem to have moved on quite well from their horrific experiences in Necropolis. The fact that they don’t seem to recognize the newly found containment barrel marked with the label of 2-4-5 Trioxin just adds to the weird and huge plot hole between film four and five. One would think that these kids would have it etched forver in their minds that containment barrel with 2-4-5- Trioxin equals horror. Instead they naively investigate and research the barrel with one of their friends realizing he could turn the chemical leaking from the barrel into a new form of rave drug whose extreme hallucinogenic effects also hide a side-effect which basically turns anyone who partakes of the drug into a zombie.

The rest of the movie deals with the survivors finally realizing the crisis they’ve unleashed and instead of calling for police or military help decide to go to the same outdoor rave party where everyone is taking the drug to try and find the person who made the drug Z and stop him from taking them. Like I said earlier, the film really has major plot holes and most of the time doesn’t make much sense. What we get in the end is an excuse to have a huge set piece where the survivors get to shoot as many zombies as possible while at the same time allow for the random raver to suddenly become a zombie out of the blue. There’s also a subplot of a couple of bumbling Men-in-Black type agents whose job it is to recover the Trioxin barrel while remaining inconspicuous. The secret organization they belong to must be global since I could barely understand their lines with the heavy Russian accent used by both “actors”.

My disappointment in what could’ve been a nice follow-up to the first three Return of the Living Dead movies was compounded by the sheer Z-movie level of Rave to the Grave after the awful work that was Necropolis. For those wanting to see a good b-level zombie movie that’s bad but enjoyable at the same time should check out House of the Dead 2. Yes, the sequel to Uwe Boll’s rancid and awful House of the Dead ended up being better than the original and way more entertaining than Return of the Living Dead 5: Rave to the Grave. I wouldn’t even accept this film as a free dvd if someone gave it to me. In fact, I may end up punching that person as a reflex action.

Quickie Review: Return of the Living Dead 4: Necropolis (dir. by Ellory Elkayem)

Posted on February 11, 2011 by Arleigh

I remember watching the original Return of the Living Dead in 1985. That zombie movie played on the premise that Night of the Living Dead actually happened. It was a great twist and interesting idea. The zombies in that film weren’t shambling and dumb like the one’s in Romero’s film. Instead these zombies were pretty quick and could talk and formulate plans and traps. Also these zombies couldn’t be killed by destroying the brain. It was the birth of the superzombies and it made for a fun experience. One thing it also had was a nice dose of comedy mixed in with the horror.

A few years later they had a sequel to Return of the Living Dead that was a good second helping. Nothing to write home about but it was a fun gory flick. Then came a second sequel which dropped the comedy and instead tried to be Romeo and Juliet meets brain-eating zombies. Other than the usual gore and bloodsplatter this second sequel was an utter failure. It took over 10 years for someone to try making a couple more sequels, but sure enough someone found a way to do it. They even found a good enough director in Ellory Elkayem (he directed the fun, campy giant spider monster flick Eight-Legged Freaks). There was talk that this third sequel will return the ROTLD franchise back to its roots of horror mixed with comedy. I was stoked about the news. Then when it came time to see Return of the Living Dead 4: Necropolis, I found out that it was going to go direct-to-cable. This usually means bad news all around about the overall quality of the finished film, but I was still going to give it a chance.

I finally saw its premiere on Sci-Fi channel in 2005 and all my low expectations weren’t even reached by the what I saw on the TV. The movie starts off well enough and right from the get-go they don’t hide the fact that the film is taking place in some Eastern European country. Peter Coyote the — only actor with any sort of talent — makes his appearance in this scene and there’s not even any attempt to make his character abit mysterious of whether he’s a good guy or a bad guy. Coyote’s scientist role in the film screams evil mad scientist. The rest of the cast seemed like it was randomly picked from a college campus and from the streets of Romania. The dialogue was bad enough but having them read out loud by amateurs just made it all worse.

The whole premise of the film outside of reintroducing newcomers to the zombifying effects of Trioxin seemed like the writers were trying to emulate Resident Evil instead of Return of the Living Dead. There’s the mega-corporation which deals with everything known to man and also research and develops illegal biowarfare technology like zombies armed with hi-tech weapons. Resident Evil did this better (thats not saying much) so it goes without saying that ROTLD4: Necropolis just didn’t know what it wanted to be. There wasn’t any of the comedy that made the first two films in the franchise so fun to watch. It looked as if they tried to make a serious zombie movie and instead it turned out to be seriously bad.

Even the zombies themselves ended up being inconsistent with the zombies from the first two films. Some seemed smart enough but most were of the Romero kind which goes against everything that is ROTLD. Their feeding habits even changed from eating nothing but brains but to eating other parts of the body. Then the filmmakers made it so they’re not indestructible anymore. Shooting these zombies in the head will drop them like a sack of bricks.

There really wasn’t anything fun about this sequel. Zombie movies are suppose to be dumb, gory fun but instead Return of the Living Dead 4: Necropolis just ends up being dumb, horrible and awful. I had alot of hope in Ellory Elkayem as an up-and-coming genre director, but cranking out this film after making such a fun one in Eight-Legged Freaks is a mystery and saddening. I wouldn’t recommend this film as a rental on dvd. Just go rent the original trilogy of films in the series and leave this one alone.