Drone

Canadian filmmaker Jason Bourque (Classified: The Edward Snowden Story) wants you to know that drone strikes are, you know, really bad. Unfortunately, he does this with a well-meaning but ultimately ham-handed dysfunctional-family drama, into which he has shoehorned some stuff about drones.

Instead of focusing on the lives that have been wrecked by the thousands of drone strikes in Pakistan, Bourque turns our attention to a stateside family, led by an IT guy (a meek-as-hell Sean Bean) who's actually an on-the-down-low contractor for the CIA, targeting terrorists from his safe workspace. He's not the only family member keeping secrets. His wife (Mary McCormack) is having an affair, while his son (Maxwell Haynes) has been distant after the death of his grandfather. Their world eventually gets rocked when a well-mannered Pakistani gent (Patrick Sabongui) shows up at their door looking to buy the late granddad's boat. But you already know he's there to let everyone know how dad brings home the bacon.

Bourque and his writers have decided that the best way to hip audiences to the countless civilian deaths overseas is to have the horror and tragedy show up right on our shores. Yet Bourque, who moodily shoots this film as though the suburbs were scarier than the Middle East, seems more interested in portraying Americans as selfish, ignorant asshats, way too preoccupied with themselves to see the hell they're putting people through a world away. And while that's mostly true, how is that more meaningful than showing us the families we've devastated? This movie is basically Ordinary People if Donald Sutherland killed Pakistanis for a living.