Drone | Film review - The War on Terror comes home

(Image credit: SKY © Signature Entertainment.)

Choose Your Target Wisely.

Sean Bean adopts an American accent and an air of grizzled anguish as a suburban family man forced to confront the blowback from the war on terror in Drone, a bluntly unsubtle thriller that scopes out similar territory to Good Kill and Eye in the Sky, but to less effect.

Neither his straying wife (Mary McCormack) nor moody teenage son (Maxwell Haynes) know that his IT desk job involves piloting drones for the CIA, until an enigmatic Pakistani businessmen (Patrick Sabongui) turns up at their door. What has he got in that briefcase?

The plotting here is clunky and unconvincing, and much of the dialogue blatantly on the nose, but the gripping climactic standoff does hit the target.

Certificate 15. Runtime 86 mins. Director Jason Bourque

Drone debuts on Sky Cinema Premiere on Monday 13 November. Available on DVD & Digital from Signature Entertainment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwiOq-dJgDM

A film critic for over 25 years, Jason admits the job can occasionally be glamorous – sitting on a film festival jury in Portugal; hanging out with Baz Luhrmann at the Chateau Marmont; chatting with Sigourney Weaver about The Archers – but he mostly spends his time in darkened rooms watching films. He’s also written theatre and opera reviews, two guide books on Rome, and competed in a race for Yachting World, whose great wheeze it was to send a seasick film critic to write about his time on the ocean waves. But Jason is happiest on dry land with a classic screwball comedy or Hitchcock thriller.