Director: Denis Villeneuve Starring: Emily Blunt, Josh Brolin, Benicio Del Toro Writer: Taylor Sheridan | 4.5/5 Sicario What a weekend to see movies! After a few drought weeks (Maze Runner, The Perfect Guy, Lord help us…90 Minutes in Heaven), I am finally start to smell that fresh batch of Oscar contenders coming out of the oven. New to wide-release this week alone is Ridley Scott’s feel-good-but-utterly-awesome The Martian and Sicario, Denis Villeneuve’s half-prestige/half-action rumination on the the drug and border wars between the U.S. and Mexico. Better than 98% of the movies I have seen in 2015, Sicario is 121 minutes of scathing, draining, white-knuckle cinema. Why miss something this entertaining, vital, and relevant? Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, a film that won Sicario star Benicio Del Toro an Oscar, was the last film to tackle the subject with this much of an emotional impact. But Traffic, as great as it was and still is, was prestige drama all the way. As far as excitement goes, the most you could say about it is that it’s “kind of a thriller.” Sicario marries two genres (Action and Drama) with a masters skill comparable to any of the greats. It is just as affective in the explosive scenes, like the horror-show raid that opens the film, as it is in the silent ones, such as a late-in-the-game confrontation featuring Del Toro’s mysterious Alejandro. Most directors cannot pull off single-genre movies, but Villeneuve more than proves his salt as one of the most arresting filmmakers working today - as if 2013’s Prisoners failed to do that. |
Things get loud and the underlying tension only increases as the film goes on, but not once will you lose sight of Sicario’s message: how far will we go to put an end to a war that continues to get worse each year? His most chilling revelation: what comes after we realize that the war only continues to exist because of the destructive appetite of America? The cartel wars, and the border wars by default, will continue because we don’t want it to (or at least not enough of us). Every drug deal that takes places in the U.S., be it coke or heroin or any other hard narcotic, funds the bad guys, increases the staggering body count, and prolongs the fight. Everybody in the country would say they were horrified by cartel killings, but how many of them can truly feel the weight of their actions? I’m afraid that number is far lower. This is the lesson that Emily Blunt’s DEA agent Kate Macer learns the hard way.
Recruited by a peculiar, flipflop-wearing agent named Matt Graver (Josh Brolin), Kate is pulled headfirst into a fight she is nowhere near prepared to fight. Being a government agent who regularly goes on raids, she is used to seeing atrocities. What she cannot handle, as she comes to realize, is the increasing number of moral dilemmas the job puts her in. Again, how far do you go to put an end to war? Torture? Endangering innocents? Unholy alliances with foes that could possibly be just as bad as the people you are fighting? The enemy of my enemy is a friend, as they say.
No one is better prepared to carry the weight of these moral quandaries than Blunt, a newly minted American citizen and target of the incessantly hateful Fox News. We all - me included - like to see women onscreen who can really kick some ass. We love to see the Maya’s capture and eliminate the Osama bin Laden’s (Zero Dark Thirty), the Lucy’s take out drug dealers with brain waves (Lucy), or the Rita’s, speaking of Emily Blunt, slay aliens over and over again (Edge of Tomorrow). We want to see them dominate because the real world is a much bleaker place for women, especially the strong-willed ones. This is the world Sicario means to depict, and the results are traumatic to say the least.
The shady government team headed by Graver and Alejandro grabs Kate by the hair and drags her through the bloody puddles of Juarez, Mexico. You keep expecting her to have her moment of cinematic victory, but each and every time she is shot down. You could argue that Graver and Alejandro could care less whether Kate makes it out of the war alive, but not once do they feel like despicable characters. That would be thanks to the Oscar-caliber performances from Brolin and Del Toro - hey Benicio, you got more space on your mantel? Both actors have played similar characters before throughout their expansive careers, but seeing them continue to make each new turn feel new and revelatory is wondrous. All compliments aside, what Blunt is doing feels totally different. She is on a whole other level and we best watch where she goes next: straight to the top.
Before I close, I would like to shine a spotlight on two additional artists involved with this project: composer Jóhann Jóhannsson and cinematographer Roger Deakins. Jóhannsson, who just won an Oscar for his equally inspiring work on last year’s The Theory of Everything, drowns the proceedings in a thick shroud of doom. Without his score, which is the first one I have truly loved this year, Sicario would not be the movie it is. The same goes for Deakins, whose resume stretches back to the mid-seventies and includes classics like Shawshank, No Country for Old Men, and Skyfall - any fans of beautifully engaging photography should look no further than his work on The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, just saying… Anyways, back to Sicario. The way Deakins uses the sky’s natural wide array of colors is jaw-dropping. From sunset purples to open blues, you will not be able to take your eyes off of it. The same can be said of Sicario as a whole. What a film.
Recruited by a peculiar, flipflop-wearing agent named Matt Graver (Josh Brolin), Kate is pulled headfirst into a fight she is nowhere near prepared to fight. Being a government agent who regularly goes on raids, she is used to seeing atrocities. What she cannot handle, as she comes to realize, is the increasing number of moral dilemmas the job puts her in. Again, how far do you go to put an end to war? Torture? Endangering innocents? Unholy alliances with foes that could possibly be just as bad as the people you are fighting? The enemy of my enemy is a friend, as they say.
No one is better prepared to carry the weight of these moral quandaries than Blunt, a newly minted American citizen and target of the incessantly hateful Fox News. We all - me included - like to see women onscreen who can really kick some ass. We love to see the Maya’s capture and eliminate the Osama bin Laden’s (Zero Dark Thirty), the Lucy’s take out drug dealers with brain waves (Lucy), or the Rita’s, speaking of Emily Blunt, slay aliens over and over again (Edge of Tomorrow). We want to see them dominate because the real world is a much bleaker place for women, especially the strong-willed ones. This is the world Sicario means to depict, and the results are traumatic to say the least.
The shady government team headed by Graver and Alejandro grabs Kate by the hair and drags her through the bloody puddles of Juarez, Mexico. You keep expecting her to have her moment of cinematic victory, but each and every time she is shot down. You could argue that Graver and Alejandro could care less whether Kate makes it out of the war alive, but not once do they feel like despicable characters. That would be thanks to the Oscar-caliber performances from Brolin and Del Toro - hey Benicio, you got more space on your mantel? Both actors have played similar characters before throughout their expansive careers, but seeing them continue to make each new turn feel new and revelatory is wondrous. All compliments aside, what Blunt is doing feels totally different. She is on a whole other level and we best watch where she goes next: straight to the top.
Before I close, I would like to shine a spotlight on two additional artists involved with this project: composer Jóhann Jóhannsson and cinematographer Roger Deakins. Jóhannsson, who just won an Oscar for his equally inspiring work on last year’s The Theory of Everything, drowns the proceedings in a thick shroud of doom. Without his score, which is the first one I have truly loved this year, Sicario would not be the movie it is. The same goes for Deakins, whose resume stretches back to the mid-seventies and includes classics like Shawshank, No Country for Old Men, and Skyfall - any fans of beautifully engaging photography should look no further than his work on The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, just saying… Anyways, back to Sicario. The way Deakins uses the sky’s natural wide array of colors is jaw-dropping. From sunset purples to open blues, you will not be able to take your eyes off of it. The same can be said of Sicario as a whole. What a film.