![]() ![]() Bean and Sabongui do what they can, but nothing can save this. The last twenty minutes are more satisfying, but It really just exists to explain what the audience probably figured out in the first ten minutes, and very unfortunately Haynes and McCormack are forced to overact surprised in the hammiest of ways. When the film’s obvious, visible from high altitude twist finally does arrive, Drone becomes a different, sillier sort of thriller. The first hour of Drone plays as a misguided bit of slow cinema where Bean struggles to find the pathos (and American accent) of his character. Every minute of Drone reeks of maximum effort being expended for minimal payoff.īorques, who also co-wrote, leaves his film hovering for so long that he can only manage about twenty minutes of tension and topical discussion at the end of his film. It’s all set in a world where everything looks like it has been artfully tinted blue or yellow to place visual emotion where dramatic emotion fears to tread. I would venture to guess that a quarter of the film’s total running time is comprised of pauses and sighs. It doesn’t even get to the heart of what drives Imir, the more interesting character that should have been followed from the start, until way too late.ĭrone is the kind of film where everyone says a banal, overwritten line of dialogue that no human being would ever say under any circumstance, and after each of these lines there’s a lengthy pause or a thoughtful sigh. The first two-thirds of Borques’ film have little to nothing to do with drone warfare, and it barely gets to the heart of what Neil and his family are going through. That’s the plot of the Drone, but none of that plot starts to come in until almost a full hour into an 85 minute movie. The family invites Imir to dinner, and the man’s true reasons for being there reveal themselves. As he prepares for his father’s funeral, he’s visited at home by Imir (Patrick Sabongui), a reserved Pakistani businessman who says he wants to buy a boat that Neil is trying to sell. He has recently lost his father, his wife (Mary McCormack) is stressed out, and his sullen teenage son (Maxwell Haynes) isn’t handling things well. Neil Wistin (Sean Bean) works in upstate Washington at a top-secret facility carrying out drone strikes in Asia. More of an underdeveloped reflection on loss and internalized suffering than a trenchant indictment of the current state of modern warfare, Drone never figures out what to do with what little it has, making it one of the dullest films of the year thus far. Or would he? A couple of nice plot twists overshadow the predictable sound-of-sorrow ethnic wail that closes the film.Filmmaker Jason Bourque’s Drone is named after the controversial, remotely piloted aircraft that the film’s main character operates, but it’s more appropriately the best word to describe the tone of this lifeless, inert thriller. Played adroitly by Patrick Sabongui, this guy wouldn't hurt a fly. That aside, Drone is a simmering, on-target drama involving a visiting Pakistani businessman whose motive and briefcase are both suspicious. ![]() We got this in 2014's Good Kill, but there's a good case to be made that it's a poppycock narrative. More importantly, we're being pushed this notion that dropping bombs from an airplane is morally superior to drone strikes. His recently deceased father, we learn, "dropped bombs on Hitler." The scriptwriter's math is off: Bean's middle-aged character is too young to have a father of such vintage. Veteran actor Sean Bean is an American civilian contracted to obliterate Pakistanis from an office chair in suburban USA. We get that in Drone, a taut Canadian thriller from the Vancouver-born director Jason Bourque. Drone-warfare films tend to carry the message that bomb-dropping jockeys are so far away from "battlefields" that they're removed from the consequences of their remote-control actions.
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