Sicario directed by Denis Villenueve. Image courtesy of Lionsgate.
From 2013 to 2017, Denis Villeneuve was an unstoppable force in cinema. In 2013 he released Prisoners, a taut and twisty psychological thriller about the search for two missing children and the havoc it wreaks on their parents. In the same year he took a complete left turn and dropped Enemy, a stylized arthouse film steeped in the symbolism of Russian literature and wrapped up in dense and opaque thematic puzzles. Then, in 2015, Sicario was released and it was both very popular and again quite different from his previous films.
Emily Blunt, God bless her, plays a tough FBI bang-em-up team leader who stumbles on a house near the Mexican border full of dead bodies and she is quickly recruited into a special task force assigned to go after some cartel bosses. The task force is run by Josh Brolin and Benicio del Toro is also there. The team does a lot of shady things and isn’t afraid to kill their enemies in the cartel. Brolin keeps Blunt, and by extension, us in the dark until pretty much the very end when he admits the task force’s real purposes was to turn del Toro loose in Mexico to murder the entire family of a cartel boss as part of a revenge plot, but also to serve the national interest of the United States.
It works great just on its own as a pulp thriller, especially because of Brolin’s easy smug jerkness and del Toro just, well, being himself. The direction is also tight, tense and beautifully shot in an under-stated way. You really feel like you are there, on the border, in Mexico; visually it creates a textured reality that feels authentic, sparse, hard and cruel. Explanations are left hanging and laconic tough guys speak in guttural monosyllables but you get the point. You understand completely what is going on, and what a fucked up world this movie inhabits.
Naturally, Blunt as a mouthpiece for the audience becomes increasingly uncomfortable with the tactics being deployed and at the end of the film gets into a fist-fight with Brolin. The final scene involves del Toro, who has displayed some weird kind of affection for her character, placing the character’s own gun under her chin and making her sign a form that says the operation was done by the book. This scene reached a level of cartoon super-villainy that I did not like and felt was out of place in the gritty realism of the rest of the movie.
Yeah, del Toro kills an entire cartel by himself which is also quite cartoony – but the unstoppable killer archetype is one I have always been a fan of so I can let that slide. But coming into Blunt’s apartment and putting a gun under her chin? I realize this is supposed to be some kind of emotional climax that makes a grand statement about the brutal world we live in and the compromises we must make when we go after bad guys. But, come on – I think we already kinda got that didn’t we? Do we really need Benicio del Toro to walk in and embody it and say “You’re in a world of wolves now”? I could have done without it.
The movie digs into fairly well-trod territory: the moral compromises that “good guys” make in order to catch “bad guys” until they’ve shifted so far on the continuum that it becomes almost impossible to tell which is which. Only Emily Blunt escapes this moral vacuum, and we are richer for it. In less skilled hands, with less skilled actors, this might have skirted the edges of cliche, but the visual style helps convey the utter amorality of Sicario’s bleak, devastated world and that, along with great performances, makes all the difference.
There was also one Mexican character tossed in to be a humanizing counter-weight to all this and show the base human cost in the machinery of the war on drugs, but his presence felt a bit like a token. I don’t think this movie was as rich or complex as some might have painted it (it was, after all, made for mass consumption), but it was an absolutely great fucking movie that touches on some deep, dark themes. Villeneuve’s next film, however, the beautiful and deeply meditative Arrival, would ultimately top it in my opinion.