SUSPENSEFUL ‘KILL TEAM’ HITS ITS TARGET
Director Dan Krauss, best known for his work as a documentarian, earned glowing reviews last year for “5B,” a chronicle about life in the AIDS ward at San Francisco General Hospital in the ’80s.
Now he’s made his first narrative feature, the suspenseful “The Kill Team,” but it has roots in his 2013 documentary of the same name. That earlier film told the story of Adam Winfield, a 21-year-old soldier fighting in Afghanistan faced with a tough decision: report on the wholesale war crimes being committed by his platoon and perhaps become the next one to die in the desert with a bullet to the head or go along to get along.
In the new version, that soldier is now Andrew Briggman (Nat Wolff, “The Fault in Our Stars”), an eager, by-the-book kid who at first wants to please his new commander, Sergeant Deeks (a chilling Alexander Skarsgard). But Briggman soon learns that Deeks is not just about the mission — ostensibly locating those making explosives — but torturing and killing locals, even if there’s no evidence they’ve done anything wrong.
Through sheer force of personality and smooth-talking emotional manipulation, Deeks wins over most of the squad, who begin to suspect that Briggman is not “one of us.” Briggman, too, is tempted by his siren song of victory through vengeance and slaughter — “We kill people. That’s what we do,” Deeks says matter-of-factly after Briggman raises an objection — but something keeps him from giving himself up completely. But that may not be enough to save him.
What Krauss has created is a somewhat
predictable military horror story with Deeks as the monster, with eyes and ears everywhere, who seems to be everywhere at once. And it’s certainly far from the first war film to question who the good guys are or make the age-old point that we have the met the enemy and he is us.
But “The Kill Team” is so skillfully made, sharply paced (it clocks in under 90 minutes), and generally well-acted (Skarsgard in particular) that its flaws are easy to forgive. Besides, its main point that conscience should never cow to convenience is a lesson that never gets old.