The Kill Team (2019)

 

            In 2014, Dan Krauss directed a documentary entitled “The Kill Team” about a war crime in Iraq.  He followed this up with two Oscar-nominated documentaries.  In 2019, he converted his documentary into a feature film of the same title.  He wrote the screenplay and directed it.  For some reason, he changed the names of the soldiers in the documentary.  Adam Winfield becomes Andy Briggman.  

            Andy Briggman (Nat Wolff) is gung-ho about joining the Army.  His father is proud of him.  Andy can’t wait to see the elephant and that won’t take long as he is sent to the Kandahar Valley in Afghanistan in 2007.  His sergeant is big on winning “hearts and minds”, but the men are not.  His quest to win over the Afghanis ends with a bang as he steps on an IED.  Very subtle.  He is replaced by Sgt. Deeks (Alexander Skarsgard) who is his exact opposite.  He has tons of charisma and is just the sort of leader that the men want.  He promises them payback for IED’s .  Deeks brings out their inner warriors and teaches them the tricks of the trade.  Those tricks involve getting away with murder.  Deeks is an expert in planting weapons and establishing plausibility for killing villagers.  Briggman is one of the few in his platoon who is not on board.  The other grunts are either Deeks wannabes or victims of peer pressure.  Briggman has to decide whether to stick to his principles or to be a team player.  The first route will subject him to platoon justice and the second might subject him to military justice.

            I know most people would prefer to watch a feature film instead of a documentary.  With the recent boom in streaming services like Netflix, there has been a significant rise in viewing of documentaries.  We are living in a golden age of documentaries, both making of and viewing of.  This trend has included the war genre.  I have a queue of good military documentaries to watch.  I have already seen the documentary that this movie was hatched from.  It is excellent and really did not need the drama treatment.  I fear that Dan Krauss felt his documentary did not reach a big enough audience, so a conventional film would bring his story to a mass audience.  Unfortunately, the fictionalized interpretation of the case does not improve on the documentary.

            The movie should have been able to delve more into the story than a documentary that relied on interviews to tell the tale.  Actors acting out the events of the interviews should have been more entertaining and impactful. The cast is not strong, with the exception of Skarsgard.  He was a great choice to play the amoral Deeks.  He has the requisite charisma to play a man who was able to wrap a platoon around his little trigger finger.  Deeks is at times fatherly toward Briggman and at other times menacing.  The empathetic moments don’t ring true.  The movie is weak on motivation.  It does not dig deep into what caused the soldiers to behave as murderers and/or abettors.  The question that is not answered is why did they do it?  But we are left with the question of what would you do?  Peer pressure is a bitch.

            I doubt the Pentagon cooperated in the production.  The movie gives the impression that most of our boys in Afghanistan smoked hash and enjoyed killing.  To get a more accurate view of our troops, I would recommend watching “Restrepo”.  To get a more accurate view of the actual case, clearly you need to watch “The Kill Team” documentary. 

 

GRADE  =  C