Sicario

Is this Film Worth My Time? As a rental certainly, and as a theater choice it’s a good mature thriller, the best of the crime genre in the theaters at the moment. A minor classic.

Who is this film perfect for? Middle aged men who enjoy suspenseful crime fighting films with considerable moral ambiguity.

Who will not like this film? It has a good deal of mutilated corpses laying around, there’s torture, attempted rape. Also, were it not for Benicio Del Toro’s wonderfully frayed performance; you could construe it as being anti-Mexican/ anti-Latino. But most of all, it’s a nerve-chewing film that takes an unflinching look at the cruelties of the narco-trafficantes, and for that reason it may be unpleasant for many.

Plot Summary: Training Day on the Arizona-Sonora border with a female ingénue, with strong influences from Zero Dark Thirty.

Habla mas, per favor:

This century of Mexico has been a steadily escalating parade of massacres and atrocities in the back and forth between the various drug cartels, each seemingly seeking to outdo all others in the sadism and savagery of their violences against mankind. With at least 120,000 killed, it is the worst warfare currently raging in the Western hemisphere. I continue to be amazed that it doesn’t get more attention, but I suspect that is owing to two matters: the complicity of the US government in perpetuating the criminal anarchy; and the fact that the American public can accept atrocities in the name of naked capitalism more readily than it can fathom atrocities in the name of religion.

Sicario is about the gray zone of The War on Drugs; the area where law enforcement intersects with the dirty war of US intelligence agencies. Our audience proxy for this voyage into the underworld of anti-cartel operations is Kate Mercer (Emily Blunt), whose steely wariness manages to make her a persuading FBI tactical agent. A stray bullet during a drug raid reveals a suburban house filled with plastic-wrapped corpses. And so, Agent Mercer is recruited by a CIA man (Josh Brolin) to be part of an inter-agency task force that is aiming to confront the Sonora cartel, or, in Brolin’s words, “Shake the tree and see what falls out”. The FBI is interested in arrests, the CIA is more interested in gaining infiltration and intelligence, and neither the ordinary American police nor the Mexican police can be fully trusted.

Thus begins her journey, visiting Ciudad Juarez, Phoenix, and other parts between as the task force steadily works its way up the cross-border chain of drug smuggling. The FBI is rubbing shoulders with Delta Force commandos, Texas Marshals, and the most mysterious member of the task force, a ‘consultant’ named Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro). Agent Mercer has a building crisis of conscience as the operation begins to look less like law enforcement and more like a border-hopping death squad.

South of the Border, Down Mexico Way

Sicario can be said to explain Trump’s xenophobia, if not to justify it. The Mexican cartels are monstrous institutions, and a lot of the fright of Sicario comes from the idea of their operations becoming replicated in Arizona and Texas- massacres, explosives, and the deep corruption of every layer of the police and government. It is that last aspect that keeps Sicario from being an exercise in Hispanophobia- the paranoia of how much the good old boys are also on the take. Like Zero Dark Thirty, this film could almost be an exercise in glorifying our intelligence agencies. However, writer Taylor Sheridan (Sons of Anarchy) throws in enough humanity into the enemies, and enough evil into the Feds, to keep things ambiguous, and thus suspenseful.

Director Dennis Villeneuve (Prisoners) is working derivatively, but deriving from the best- Soderbergh, Bigelow, Mann. He makes extensive and thrilling use of the visual language of special forces – sequences shot in night vision, or through satellite coverage. The most beautiful shot is where the various members of the task force, set against the skyline of a sunset, flick on their night vision goggles and tread down into the darkness of the canyon below.

The film conveys that midnight unease of being sleep deprived and over-worked, and it’s off-set by the all too real malevolence and danger of the opposing forces. The cartel is less of a Hollywood standard collection of gangsters and more of an alternative government- an octopus that is able to quickly react and retaliate, and which has tentacles of influence everywhere.

Sicario has excellent pacing and suspense. It alternates between well executed action scenes of police raids and the interstitial paranoia of an operation against a nigh-omniscient cartel. This film is a product of these times of ISIS and Los Zetas, of an era where it’s hard to distinguish the moral characters. The one shortcoming of this film, when compared to No Country for Old Men or Traffic, two comparable films, is that it doesn’t slow down enough to give more of the characters emotional or dramatic catharsis.

Sicario has a cast bringing their full skill to the performance. Few other actresses could manage the balance between ruthless professionalism and ethical and emotional vulnerability that Emily Blunt manages. Josh Brolin brings an oily charm to his character which belies his menace. Benicio Del Toro’s performance is spacey and remote- but that approach makes sense when you learn about the character. Full credits to Daniel Kaluuya, who plays Emily Blunt’s FBI partner, and to Julio Cedillo, who plays the kingpin- both are able to fully keep up with the A listers in this movie.

Sicario is one of the best crime action products of 2015, a relentlessly taut ride-along on a series of harrowing police raids, and is well worth a viewing.