Top Gun, drone style. The Ethan Hawke-starring drama Good Kill offers a unique perspective on war by exploring an overlooked aspect of modern warfare: the mentality of drone pilots. The result is a well-made, mildly stimulating movie that, perhaps due to the nature of fighting from afar, lacks the presence and stakes necessary to truly take flight.

Hawke delivers a fine performance as a pilot who becomes disillusioned with his work as a drone pilot, pulling the trigger to kill Taliban—and inevitably innocent women and children as well—from the safety of Las Vegas. Hawke is joined by a supporting cast that includes January Jones (playing his distressed wife), Zoe Kravitz (who gets the meatiest secondary role as a new crewmate who questions the morality of what they’re doing) and Bruce Greenwood (playing what almost feels like a typecast role for the actor these days).

Writer/director Andrew Niccol, who also helmed the Hawke-starring Gattaca, does a decent job of getting his point across: the risk of fighting a war from afar is that war becomes nothing more than an impersonal version of a video game. Oh, and that the CIA is sketch.

Good Kill is easy to watch and generally entertaining, and it does have a good message. But as a movie-going experience, there isn’t a lot to get your heart racing. The movie wears its message on its sleeve, shrugging off nuance for the sake of efficiency. Niccol’s characters usually adhere to a specific archetype—there’s the soldier questioning what they’re doing, another who goes by the “‘Merica, Fuck Yeah” mantra and so on and so forth—in other words, they aren’t the deepest of characters. The scenes with the faceless CIA man ordering them to kill people en masse comes across as insincere, which is a shame because these scenes are pivotal.

On a more rudimentarily, and arguably more important level, Good Kill just doesn’t take off, and even if it does, it certainly doesn’t land well—its third act doesn’t crash and burn, but it’s a bumpy landing. The emotional stakes are as slim as the physical stakes.

Good Kill is an acceptable military drama that addresses an overlooked aspect of warfare, but does the movie offer a strong reason to sit through it? Sadly, no.

Review by Erik Samdahl.