Back in 2010, director Denis Villeneuve released a movie called Incendies that was about a pair of siblings researching a family history full of rape, torture, and murder. In 2013 he released a pressure cooker of a movie about child kidnapping and pedophilia called Prisoners. So the guy has got something of a style. His newest movie, Sicario, is about the war currently being waged between US law enforcement agencies and Mexican drug cartels, so given the violent nature of that war and the unflinching style with which Villeneuve tackles everything, it’s pretty hardcore.
Emily Blunt stars as a hard ass FBI agent who gets recruited by a shady government task force dedicated to thwarting the business of the Mexican drug cartels, on account of how their extreme violence and disturbing level of influence has begun to creep over the border and into small town USA. Blunt’s character doesn’t know exactly what she’s going to be doing, or what the ultimate endgame of her actions are going to be, but she’s more than a little sure that what she’s involved in isn’t going to be on the up and up, and more and more it gets to looking like she’s not going to feel very good about herself, morally, when all is said and done.
Sicario starts off with an FBI raid on a cartel-owned house that ends up having dozens and dozens of bodies sealed up inside of its walls, and right away you know the kind of movie you’re going to be dealing with. The scene is horrifying, and it affords Villeneuve the chance to show lots of rookie cops puking their guts out after having to see and smell a bloody murder scene, which is one of the best action movie tropes ever. Any time you can put a scene of rookie cops puking their guts out in your movie, do it. More importantly than being an excuse to stick in cool action movie cliches though, this scene also does a great job of establishing a tone of dread—a tone that gets continually ramped up throughout the film until things become so tense you’ve literally moved to the edge of your seat. If there’s one thing Sicario is good at, it’s sucking you in and then jerking you around. You know, in a good way.
There isn’t just one thing Sicario is good at though, there are many. If the first thing you notice about the film is how engrossing and tense it is, the next thing is how beautiful it is to look at. That’s probably because it was shot by DP Roger Deakins (Skyfall, The Assassination of Jesse James, No Country for Old Men, etc…), a man so talented with the camera that just putting his name in the credits seems to elevate a movie. A lot of the quieter moments here take place with huge landscapes as the backdrop, just as it’s become night, with the last fiery vestiges of a desert sunset lurking in the distance, and they’re not only gorgeous, they give the film a powerful visual signature to remember it by. Even given all of the grizzly, disgusting things Villeneuve and Deakins point the camera at, they still leave you walking away feeling like you’ve seen something lovely.
The acting is worth mentioning as well, especially the performance Blunt gives as the lead. This is probably the best thing that she’s ever done. Her character is tough but conflicted, pragmatic but still unwilling to compromise on her values, and she’s able to convey all of this through her acting and without the script having to explicitly spell any of it out for us. Blunt is an actress who’s always been natural on screen and who clearly has no trouble emoting, but she’s so stunning to look at that her physicality has at times been a handicap she has to deal with and a limiting factor in the kind of roles she can play. It’s difficult to buy her as being anything other than a famous person who everyone around her gawks at. The work she does here is so raw and real though that, for the first time, I was able to buy her completely as a more regular person, and that’s very good news for her career going forward.
As far as the supporting performances go, Blunt is helped out the most by Josh Brolin and Benicio del Toro. Brolin is playing the CIA spook who recruits her character into his band of illegally acting across the border marauders, and he makes his character memorable by being very casual as he’s performing very important and very dangerous acts. As everyone else gears up in bullet proof vests, he’s sitting there barefoot, while a suspect is being tortured, he’s in the room practically napping in the background. Brolin’s character lends a mythic air to the proceedings of the film in much the same way that Robert Duvall’s did in Apocalypse Now. He leaves you feeling like you’re not just looking at the realities of a war on drugs, you’re seeing the stuff of legends.
What del Toro does might be even more important to the success of the film though. His character is on the team too, but you don’t know who he is or what he does, just that he’s even more important and even more dangerous than Brolin. What this means is that del Toro has to deliver a bunch of vague but overly dramatic lines of dialogue in an overly serious tone, and you can’t help but imagine that in so many other hands his character would have come off as a complete blowhard. Del Toro is so understated and committed to keeping a straight face that you never doubt what he says for a second though, which is essential, because though his character starts off as a source of mystery, he becomes very important to the action of the third act, and if you didn’t believe in who he was and what he was capable of doing, the whole movie would have been sunk. Spot-on casting kept that from being the case.
Overall, Sicario is a really effective action thriller with only a few small problems one might quibble with. There’s a subplot involving a Mexican police officer who has an adoring son that’s too telegraphed and on the nose to be completely effective. What it accomplishes could have definitely been done in a more subtle way that used up less screen time. Also, even though the sense of dread the film creates is generally a good thing, it can get a bit over the top, to the point where Mexico gets painted as being a nightmarish hellscape where death and mutilation is happening on every street corner always—like a version of Mordor full of drugs and guns instead of rings of power and swords, or something. That could be offensive to people who constantly deal with drug violence in real life and who don’t want to see their struggles turned into a cartoon. It makes for great cinema though, which should be priority one for a filmmaker, so let’s hope that Villeneuve keeps coming up with more brutal, memorable stuff for us to watch in the future.
