The Kill Team movie review & film summary (2019) | Roger Ebert (2024)

"The KillTeam," writer/director DanielKrauss' dramatization ofactual wartime atrocitiesby U.S.soldiers in Afghanistan, is lean, sincere,impassioned filmmaking, yet it fails to leave as much of an impression as it clearly wants to.

Part of the problem is that the movie, while focusing on unique events, takes a form that's too reminiscent (sometimes knowingly so)of other American movies about militaryatrocities, particularly Brian DePalma's "Casualties of War" and "Redacted"and Oliver Stone's "Platoon"and "Born on the Fourth of July." It focuses onNat Wolff'sPrivate Andrew Briggman, aneager young soldierwho falls under the spell of a magnetic, soft-spoken but viciously dominatingsergeant (Alexander Skarsgård's Deeks), helps coverup war crimes committed by the squad, then thinks about endangering his own safety by turning whistleblower. Krauss, a cinematographer and journalist, is adaptinghis own, same-titled documentaryabout a real-life case from 2009 and 2010,wherein a group of U.S. Army soldiers killed civilians for no defensible reasonand conspired to hide their crimes from higher-ups. That one was more about the aftermath and consequences, and this fictionalized version is about the atrocities themselves and the military culture that contributed to it.

There are two major problems, though. One is that the casting is good but rarely spot-on; this lessens the impact of the film's many tense and/or violent situations because the actors either aren't electrifying enough to take the confrontations into the stratosphere or else Krauss never quite figured out how to guide them to that place. The biggest letdown isSkarsgård, who seems to be goingfor "stone killer" but often seems merely stoned, letting his extreme height andglassy-eyed "just try it" expression carry too muchof the character's psychic and (a)moral weight.

Wolff does the best he can with a blank slate male ingenue part, which, to be fair, anchorsthe other, superior movies I've cited higher up, blanding out moments that needed more than earnestness and moral confusion. The supporting characters register more strongly, but don't have enough spotlight moments to lodge in the memory. The major exception isAdam Long'sRayburn, a grinning bully and troublemaker whoimmediately positions himselfas Deeks' strong right hand. Longhas a fire-startinggaze andrazor-edged smirk,like a baby Lee Marvin; in some scenes, he dominates his costars so thoroughly that you might wonder if he might've beenabetter choice for Deeks, despite his youth.

It's might not befair to the movie to say this, considering how closely it hews to real and thoroughly reported events, but there are too many familiar beats planted in too many expected spots on the timeline, and even the best acting can't stop you from returning to an unpleasant fact:all of these characters are types of one sort or another. The widescreen cinematography (by Stéphane Fontaine, a regular collaborator of Jacques Audiard) is not inspired enough to carry the filmpast itsrough patches; it's your standard handheld panoramic battle zone imagery, reminiscent of "The Hurt Locker," which was released the same year that this movie is set in, but with somewhatmore attention paid to framing and color.

In the end, thetruth proves to be more arresting than its fictional mirror, a conundrum that has only been experienced by a handful of directors who directed both the dramatizations of true stories and nonfiction accounts of same. (Michael Apted's "Incident at Oglala" and "Thunderheart"are a similarly mirrored pairing.) Even if you haven't seen the documentary version or read up onthe events they summarize, you might still feel as if you're getting something less than the fullest, most arrestingpicture of what went down.

The film also has little awareness of the Afghan people as individuals rather than victims or pawns. And it seems unwilling to question the idea that a war can have rules and the code of honor, and it doesn’t delve too deeply into the idea that what the soldiers did was an atrocity measurably worse than the occupation itself. Butthese qualities are characteristic of many American war films throughout history. Somehow war is always a thing that happens to Us, even if we are doing it to Them.