Sicarios are Latin American Hitmen. After the title card gets that out of the way, Director Dennis Villeneuve takes us down a desolate, tense, morally gray path into the depth of the drug war for law enforcement. As dehumanizing and terrifying Sicario gets, the movie rings pretty true to life, which is just a miserable sentence to write and ponder.
Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) is your ideal FBI agent. She believes in the work she is doing, but she seems to be unfazed by others moral ambiguity. After another successful but bloody raid against a cartel she despises, Kate accepts a job working with the Department of Defense to try to take down the cartel. The job is led by Matt Graver (Josh Brolin), who is working with the help of Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro) from the Mexican side. Kate then dives head first into the murky water of border drug trafficking, trying to keep her compass around people who ditched theirs long ago.
Sicario is TENSE. Villeneuve in the first 15 minutes establishes the tactics and heinous actions of the cartel via shock and awe. From there he grabs us and never lets go. Things like traffic jams, night raids, and simple bar hopping can quickly escalate from nothing to deadly. Sicario’s twist on the thriller involves the aftermath of the acts though. At no point until the very end does resolution come from an end of a confrontation. The world Villeneuve lives on as if nothing happened, and is taking time to regroup and refocus. That level of fear and paranoia leaves the viewer squirming in their seat, covering eyes but peeking through to see what happens next.
Traffic is still probably the gold standard for films dealing with cartels and the Mexican border due to the movie’s sheer scope. Sicario goes for the boots on the ground point of view, using Kate as the fresh face of a perpetual conflict. The tactics used in Sicario are still in use today, and the movie’s sense of realism is a great asset to the storytelling, but the movie does not add any new input into the drug war. The nihilistic message rings true, but will lead to a collective sad shrug from the audience.
Is there nothing Emily Blunt cannot do? After showing her action chops in Live.Die.Repeat, Blunt brings the acting chops for Sicario. Her Kate has the biggest arc in the film, letting the events that happen to her slowly change her persona over time. Blunt gives us varying levels of change with each incident and how it personally affects the character, nailing her role with aplomb. Josh Brolin is fine as the DoD official; he can play charming and mysterious in his sleep. It was more surprising to see Benicio Del Toro step up and dazzle. After about 10 minutes with him, the audience probably realizes the title is going to be a reference to his actions. Del Toro is menacing just using wordless facial expressions, a talent Villeneuve uses to great effect. Jon Bernthal, Daniel Kaluuya, Julio Cedillo, and Maximiliano Hernandez are also put in good work.
The final sequence of Sicario is heartbreaking. The drug war has become so prevalent and common for the people living near Juarez or anywhere else on the border that murder is just a way of life. Come on Sicario, you could at least make Emily Blunt smile once for the audience.