SICARIO

Sicario

Grade: B+

Starring: Emily Blunt, Benicio del Toro, Josh Brolin, Daniel Kaluuya, Victor Garber, Jon Bernthal and Maximiliano Hernandez

Premise: An idealistic FBI agent is recruited to a narcotics tax force battling the influx of drugs from Mexico. She is surprised to find almost immediately that the drug cartels aren’t the only ones who don’t play by the rules.

Rated R for bloody violence and disturbing images, language, scary moments, and some sexual content

Sicario is a dark, bruising film about what it means to live in a depraved, fallen world. It shows the dark side of battling the disease that is the drug trade. Denis Villenueve’s film (from Taylor Sheridan’s screenplay) suggests that, for something as dark and penetrating as the drug trade, it can’t always be as simple and righteous as kicking down doors, arresting the bad guys, and showing off piles of confiscated drugs and cash to the TV cameras. As one character tells another late in the film “If you want to live in the land of wolves, you have to be a wolf.” It’s a well-made, brilliantly-shot film with several fine performances, though if you were hoping for a more gung-ho, patriotic film about good guys stopping the bad guys in the name of justice, in a clear battle of right and wrong, wait for the Secret Soldiers of Benghazi movie from Michael Bay. It should tell you something that the title is Mexican for “hitman”. This is movie with a skewed, cracked moral compass, but it’s masterful and devastating in the way it portrays the shades of gray in one deep bruise on humanity’s conscience.

Plot

A high-flyer in the war on human trafficking, FBI Agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) is a crack operative, one of the best of the best. Her reputation has gotten around. One day—shortly after her team busts down a door and finds something even worse than kidnapped human beings in a small, cramped house in an Arizona suburb—she’s recruited to a specialized anti-drug task force in El Paso, led by smooth-talking Matt Graver (Josh Brolin). Matt and his mysterious enforcer Alejandro (Benicio del Toro) are at the front of a team looking to make a splash in the drug trade at the border by kidnapping the relative of a big-time drug lord in the hopes that the main man will show himself. Assuring Kate she’ll make a difference—after her recent gruesome findings and a hidden bomb that killed two men on her team, Kate is eager to find the people who would commit such atrocities—they immediately make an incursion into Juarez, Mexico, and nab a guy. But Kate has her doubts when Matt and Alejandro are vague in the details of who the man is or why they have him, and she has even more when their men initiate an armed engagement with drug runners in an area crowded with civilians. She soon suspects she is nothing more than a pawn, a front for Matt and Alejandro and their dark, subversive activities. But she has no idea how deep the rabbit hole goes.

What Doesn’t Work?

If you like everything laid out neatly for you, this isn’t your movie. Not even close. It can be frustrating how quiet and devoid of simple answers lots of Sicario is. It’s a movie about manipulation, and fighting fire with fire, and justifying any means with the ends achieved. The characters are given motivations but little in the way of backstory or personality—there’s nothing along the line of a big, character-building moment. It also doesn’t quite provide the action that seems to be promised—there is action, but it is dark and grueling, not the pocorn blockbuster variety. It’s a slow burn to a dark, dark climax.

If you didn’t get the hint yet, it’s not a movie that leaves you feeling very cheerful.

What Works?

It’s a gnarly flick, though, one where subtle hints and seemingly-meaningless scenes slowly become very, very important, as in life-or-death important. It asks you to consider whether the means are justified by the ends they achieve. What constitutes “making a difference” in something as ongoing and impossible as the war on drugs? What is an appropriate punishment for someone who would attempt to legitimize his role in the drug trade with the uniform he wears? What do you do to a man who has a nice house and a nice family and seems like a regular businessman, when he sits atop a veritable food chain of a drug cartel in which people are kidnapped, killed, tortured and taken advantage of every day?

The key performances are strong without being flashy. Blunt, who also played a conflicted action heroine in last summer’s Edge of Tomorrow, is the audience’s conscience, a toughie and a patriot but someone who believes in right and wrong and not crossing the line, even though she’s seen how some do cross the line. She’s solid, and her growing internal conflict is easy to sense and understand even as she uses minimal words to portray it. Brolin has his usual swagger but it’s here suffused by a determination to see everything through a sardonic, tinted, look-at-the-big-picture lens. Del Toro—who won an Oscar in 2000 for Traffic, another big movie about how the drug trade impacts everyone—uses his big frame and impassive visage to loom intimidatingly over the film long before he does anything significant, but he turns out to have a huge role to play, and he teaches Blunt (and the audience) the “become a wolf if you want to live among the wolves” lesson in the most dramatic, unsubtle way possible.

The cinematography is terrific, full of slow-panning shots of cities and country-sides that build the tension until even beautiful sceneries are seemingly bursting with horrifying possibilities. The camera also captures a few close-ups of certain characters’s faces that will stick with you. The tension is built all along by a muted but addicting drum-driven score. And the final, wordless scene brilliantly drives home the horror of the ongoing drug trade and the violence and darkness it creates even as it focuses on a calm, domestic environment.

Content

Sicario is a hard R, with plenty of splattery head shots and pools of blood, plus a few unexpected shocks and plenty of bad words. Also, with its gloomy outlook, it’s definitely not for the faint of heart. Leave the kiddies and the optimists at home.

Bottom Line

One of those dark, brooding films you sit through waiting for some awesome gunfight or car chase, only to get to the end and realize dang, that actually was a pretty good movie, Sicario shows just how dark the world can be, both in terms of the drug trade and the human tendencies for sin and vice that created it. An effective musical score, strong cinematography, and notable performances by Emily Blunt, Benicio del Toro and Josh Brolin make this a solid, thought-provoking venture for the tougher, more daring moviegoer.

Sicario (2015)

Directed by Dennis Villenueve

Screenplay by Taylor Sheridan

Rated R

Length: 121 minutes