The Kill Team is a 2019 drama about a young American soldier in Afghanistan who is disturbed by his commanding officer’s behavior.
After the shocking death of his Sergeant – a man embracing a more diplomatic approach to local relationship building – Andrew Briggman (Nat Wolff) and his team of young soldiers in a remote part of Afghanistan find themselves under the leadership of a new sergeant, Deeks (Alexander Skarsgård), a brash, callous figure with a brutal agenda, ordering the men to commit acts of atrocities, something Briggman has motivation for but not the capacity.
Based on true events, director Dan Krauss returns to the story he first exposed in his 2013 documentary of the same name, now changing the names and a bit of the story to fictionalize the reported war crimes. It puts focus on Briggman, well played by Wolff, who has no real combat experience but is witnessing the results of horrific loss from IEDs, one we see at the start of the film killing his team’s sergeant. And then others, who are maimed or worse, giving him an honestly earned hatred for the people whose country he is now stuck in.
This finds him under the command of Deeks, who is bloodless in his retribution, coldly hunting people with his soldiers, taking the mantra ‘we kill people’ to heart. This leaves Briggman in a bind as he becomes witness to murder, some of the men in his squad embracing the rage that has long roiled within them. Naturally, this places The Kill Team in a purposeful paradox where good stands cleanly divided from evil with the middle all greyed out for the film to rattle about in. It’s very noble in its efforts to do that, but is also not so subtle in its delivery.
We’ve been here before of course, from Platoon to Casualties of War and more, where an innocent scarred by conflict faces their biggest fight on the moral battlefield. There’s a lot good about what Krauss is trying to do, the place and time convincing and the cast well embedded into the thick of things, even as the characters on opposite ends of the spectrum are colored in broad strokes. Briggman is practically divine while Deeks is a slab of husky-voiced metal. That’s necessary I suppose for keeping the audience comfortable with their own judgements, but there is risk that, like many films of this nature, the larger message is that all soldiers are aligned only to these archetypes, where of course, men in women in uniform are predominantly hard working, well-trained people doing their jobs well.
Still, there is some genuine drama at play here as the film side-steps combat for inhouse mystery, keeping us wondering if Briggman will be exposed. Krauss capably frames a claustrophobic bout of tension within the compound as Briggman becomes further sunk into the mayhem. It’s hard not to ask yourself what you might do in the same situation. It’s important to know that stories like this exist, that there are people on the right side of justice, but The Kill Team sort of plays into that with a heavy hand, simplifying much of the context without truly giving it the weight it feels so ready to deliver. It wants to be a constructive criticism of war itself, yet feels restrained, keeping so much of it obvious that it lacks the real emotional punch it needs. Nonetheless, genre fans will certainly find plenty to like and kudos to Krauss for continuing to give attention to a story that deserves revisting.