Still technically a pilot, Major Thomas Egan (Ethan Hawke, GATTACA) feels like a coward blowing up targets in Afghanistan with weaponized drones (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) with a joystick at a military base only a few minutes from his Las Vegas home. On his sixth tour (three of which have been UAV tours), he is already a seething mass of self-recrimination and self-pity oblivious to his wife's (MAD MEN's January Jones) feelings of neglect, his son's (Zion Rain Leyba) behavioral issues, and daughter's (Sachie Capitani) background adorableness. Not long after he is assigned to train Airman Vera Suarez (THE BRAVE ONE's Zoë Kravitz, daughter of Lenny Kravitz and Lisa Bonet), Lieutenant Colonel Jack Johns (Bruce Greenwood, THE SWEET HEREAFTER) announces that they will be collaborating with the CIA on a handful of missions that do not officially exist. In the CIA's "prosecution" of signature strikes (patterns of behavior) over the air force's usual personality strikes (known persons), Johns, Egan, and Suarez become frustrated with the overriding of their own training, instincts, and even their sense of honor ("Was that a war crime, sir?"). With an escalating sense of guilt for having "no skin in the game", Egan pushes Johns to recommend him for another flight tour of duty without realizing just how much his desire to fly again has alienated him from his family. As his home life crumbles, it may take an act of defiance on the "battlefield" for Egan to feel he has truly made a difference. The AMERICAN SNIPER-lite script feels a few drafts short of adequate with Thomas' downward spiral illustrated with vignettes of gambling, drunk driving, and explosions of anger while neither his marriage or the rest of his family life is sufficiently established for the viewer to care. Whether the film's heavy-handedness is also an effect of the sketchiness of the scripting is less certain. For every powerful little moment like Hawkes' offhand "Why do we wear our flight suits," Greenwood's colonel is saddled with lines like "Don't ask me if it's a just war; for us, it's just war." The finished product is regrettable as Egan's internal struggle is conceptually very compelling and could have been more cerebral and actually character-driven rather than just going through the motions of an awards-bait character study.