The Kill Team

There's a lot of squawking here about the message of this movie, and frankly i don't understand the outrage. As a Navy veteran, I can attest to the fact that most of our servicemen and servicewomen are decent and honorable, but there is sometimes the soldier or sailor who is there for the wrong reasons.

Why would good soldiers defend these indefensible monsters?

In the news these days is Chief Edward Gallagher, an example of such a monster, who has brought dishonor to Seal Team Seven. These heroes have been punished for daring to speak out about Gallagher's crimes, and the Secretary of the Navy has resigned in the aftermath, because a draft-dodging phony of a president sides with that psychotic murderer.

As with the police, the good actors need to expose the bad actors.

As a possible war with Iran looms, people need to see this movie.

There is a lot of tension in this film, as a young American soldier in Afghanistan finds that his sergeant wants to make his team do unacceptable things. There are issues of conscience, obviously, but the story also touches the difficulty of breaking rank, reporting anything above your superior officer, behaving differently than your teammates, the casual bullying in the army and the general apathy regarding due process or anything other than the blind discipline required of military people.

The story in the film is based on the Maywand District murders, about which the writer/director of the film also talked in a documentary from 2013 that he also directed.

But while the story is important, the movie is not that great. Alexander Skarsgård does his charismatic yet dangerous guy role, and Nat Wolff did a good job with the main character, but the rest of the plot felt either rushed, or disjointed or plain bland. It really felt like a prolonged dream sequence. I rather preferred the two actors in The Stand. The other actors had almost nothing to work with. There was very little characterisation, even for the two lead actors.

Sometimes it is hard to bring real life cases to the big screen and also make them entertaining. Perhaps there was not much to tell other than what was in the film, perhaps the respect of the author for the facts prohibited him to add the usual bull that people add to create tension, release it, bring humor, make greater than life characters out of ordinary people. In the end, though, I felt uncomfortable with the tension, disconnected from the situation and caring very little about the characters.

This was a decent effort elevated by Alexander Skarsgard who plays low key menacing so well. There was a strong sense of the dilemma our lead young soldier felt as he wrestles between doing the right thing and fitting in with his team. The film feels very claustrophobic and it seemed like a realistic portrait of a powerless and lonely existence on the bottom rung of the US Army.

A24 has been proving themselves as one of the best studios out there today, but there are a few genres that they haven't dabbled much in yet. I would argue that Comedy and War are two genres that they have a slim number of films in, so I was pleasantly surprised when I heard about The Kill Team. On top of that, I love it when a movie can tell such a simple story and keep you incredibly engaged. The Kill Team absolutely fits that description. Gripping and unsettling to watch these events that happen on a daily basis somewhere in the world, here's why I believe The Kill Team is worth your time.

After young Andrew Briggman (Nat Wolff) is given his position in the war in Afghanistan, he very quickly has that shaken when his commanding officer is killed. Given a new leader in Sergeant Deeks (Alexander Skarsgård), this team must adapt to a very new practice, one in which Briggman is highly against. Although not a very violent film in nature, the subject matter had me sick to my stomach at times, just thinking about how this type of thing goes on in our daily lives. We truly live in a brutal world and this movie chooses to showcase just why that is.

Written and directed by Dan Krauss, this film is a commanding first outing for him, stating that he is very much capable of handling a full feature. Having not heard this name before the release of The Kill Team, I will be keeping an eye on his work from now on. Although simple in nature, this movie has a fantastic pace. At a mere 88 minutes, the progression of Andrew Briggman is really what stood out to me. If for nothing else, this is an independent war film that puts its characters before the action and that's nothing but commendable in my opinion.

Where this film slightly lost me and may lose others, however, is in its repetitive nature. I found there to be a few too many scenes of Briggman not liking what he's seeing and then trying to do something about it. There were a few story beats that were repeated that felt a little unnecessary. Other than that, this is a very tight, tense, and impactful little film that I was invested in from start to finish. It also didn't hurt that Skarsgård was delivering a great, slimy performance as well.

In the end, The Kill Team may not be as fantastic as I was hoping it would be, but I was still sucked in from the very first scene. As mentioned, this is a very tense film that pulls no punches in terms of telling it how it is. Although I didn't know the true story beforehand, it seemed very truthful in its storytelling. This is a very well-made war film that I definitely recommend checking out. It's now playing in a few select theatres and available to purchase and stream digitally.

I attended two films in a row suffering from exactly the same flaw: the main protagonist left at the climax with no choice, cancelling out any previous drama in the story. First up was "Mickey and the Bear", where the heroine was faced with choosing between staying with her messed-up war vet of a father to care for him, or getting on with her own life by going away to college.

Then came "The Kill Team", a standard-issue anti-war movie whose hero is faced with becoming a whistle blower and putting an end to the murderous activities of his squad in Afghanistan, or becoming part of the killing team. As directed by Dan Krauss, who previously treated the same material to a documentary feature, we can identify with the kid put in a tough situation, but the real-life plot twist after the film's climax robs him of choice, making this just another slice-of-life reality downer.

There are many important issues raised along the way, especially how the military is designed to dehumanize young recruits in order to get them to carry out dangerous missions, as well as numerous side issues like bullying, indoctrination and even the strong effects of violent videogames on an impressionable youngster's psyche, but the crisis of conscience at the center of the story is presented more like a rat in a trap than a potential profile in courage. Worse yet, the key scene involving the killing of an innocent old Afghani civilian is staged so poorly that I couldn't follow clearly exactly what happened, only to witness the hero becoming implicated in the evil around him.

Alexander Skarsgard is fine as the nominal villain of a ruthless squad sergeant, while Nat Wolff as the hero remains a blank throughout. It's a role reminiscent of many that Tom Courtenay delivered brilliantly in the 1960s,/70s, ranging from "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner" to "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", his tortured expressions conveying his situational pain as perhaps no other actor could. But even though we can vicariously, from the safety of our cinema seat far from war, identify with Wolff's Andrew Briggman, by film's end this is just another piece of escapism, in which the viewer can go home with a "Whew!", thanking God that one doesn't find oneself in Briggman's predicament.