Drone is not a movie. It desperately wants you to think it is: there are aerial shots (so many aerial shots), Sean Bean grimaces a lot and several scenes are oversaturated and edited with the flowy sensibility of a Levi’s ad. Movies, though, teach you something. They don’t have to be didactic, they don’t even have to be moral, but they should make an attempt to illuminate a world or concept or experience to an otherwise unfamiliar audience.
On all of these fronts, Drone fails. We learn nothing by the end of its interminable 91 minutes other than the fact that people die sometimes and there are lots of mirrors in suburbia. It is not a movie so much as the cinematic doppelgänger of your aunt’s undercooked Facebook status about violent video games.
On paper, the premise intrigues, and with a lot of honing, it could make an interesting one-act. Neil (Sean Bean, perplexingly bad) lives in the idyllic Washington suburbs with his wife (“The West Wing”’s Mary McCormack) and son (Maxwell Haynes). They think he codes for a robotics company, but he actually works as a CIA contractor who tests military drone programs from his remote Pacific Northwest office. A routine mission goes awry, and a year later, while Neil is dealing with the death of his father, the consequences come home to roost.
The film then morphs into a mysterious-stranger-at-the-dinner-table thriller, rife with the sorts of ideological discussions that penetrate Satyajit Ray’s The Stranger. It strings together a bundle of tinny clichés about modern warfare before exploding into one of the more ridiculous climaxes in recent memory.
Even as camp, though, the film can’t stay afloat. Put simply, it’s just really, really boring. Drone is remarkable in its insistence on draining every drop of tension from its somewhat promising setup. The screenplay by director Jason Bourque is a masterclass in how not to structure a thriller. He telegraphs the final twist from the very first scene and tells us who the “mysterious stranger” really is a good 50 minutes before anyone else. Worse, he fails to actually set the plot in motion until the film’s final third, when we hardly care what happens to these people, so long as they stop talking about Neil’s dead dad and his fucking boat.
The worst thing about Drone, though, is how smart it thinks it is. It’s the feature-length equivalent of one of those Tumblr illustrations that likens smartphones to heroin.
Characters say things like “These men come home to their wives and kids after a long day of murder,” about American drone operators, and we’re supposed to shudder as if this is a razor-sharp indictment of the military-industrial complex. Bourque’s script is screeching and righteous, soapboxing endlessly about how remote violence bypasses empathy and how families never truly know one another, but it absolutely refuses to tell us something we don’t already know. Frustratingly, he has a real eye for visual composition, but he sledgehammers us with aerial shots (like drones!), mirrors (we’re all two different people!) and airplane imagery (DRONES!!!!) to the point of condescension.
The film ends with a nod to Edward Snowden (seriously), and in evoking him, it hints at the movie Drone might have been. Bourque’s intentions are good—though he could stand to stop introducing every single non-white character with vaguely Middle Eastern music—and his film ends up showing us the path from working in a corrupt environment to exposing that corruption. If he had stuck to that theme, shaved down the extraneous exposition and stopped telegraphing his every move, he might be onto something.
As it stands, though, Drone feels like a sad rip-off of last year’s Pierce Brosnan vehicle I.T., which was in itself a sad rip-off of Eye in the Sky. If you’re looking for a morally queasy techno-thriller, see that. Or War Games. In the end, Drone ironically mimics the structure of the very machines it seeks to criticize: it goes through the motions, but on closer inspection, there’s nothing inside.
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