The first Sicario didn’t really do it for me. It felt like a reductive and thematically muddled story with weirdly racist and sexist undertones that managed to be slightly elevated by Denis Villeneuve’s very precise and patient form of suspense filmmaking, which goes double for Roger Deakins’ cinematography and the excellent score by the late Jóhann Jóhannsson. It just didn’t have anything particularly interesting or compelling to say, and the things it did say were fairly mundane. For my money, the documentary, Cartel Land, is a far more compelling take on the War on Drugs, and it came out the same year.
But now we have – for some reason – a sequel to the 2015 film with Sicario: Day of the Soldado. Sheridan is back penning the script, but Denis Villeneuve is out, with Italian filmmaker, Stefano Sollima, serving as the director. It follows returning characters, Matt Graver (Josh Brolin) and Alejandro Gillick (Benicio del Toro), who hatch up a plan in the escalating drug war as the cartels have officially been classified as a terrorist organization by the US government. Their big plan? Kidnapping the daughter of one of the cartel kings, and making the cartels take it out on each other. Naturally, things don’t go as planned, and it gets complicated from there.
It becomes very clear in the opening moments of the film that it basically doubles down on all the #Problematic™ elements that was in the first Sicario. We first see an Islamic extremist being caught in the midst of Mexican migrants before setting off his explosive, and it’s immediately followed by a rather disturbing sequence in which several suicide bombers enter a Target and blow themselves up. If you’re thinking that this angle plays a part of the story at large, you’d be wrong. It’s only used as a catalyst to allow the government to use more war-like tactics in their fight against the cartel. It feels extremely exploitative, and puts the kind of bad taste in your mouth that doesn’t really leave for the rest of the film.
The film also continues in its rather uncomfortable treatment of Latino characters. Genuinely affecting humanity is far too lacking as it moves each person-of-color along in service to Matt’s goals. I wouldn’t go as far as to say it veers into white-saviorism (except for a minor beat at the end) since these films have largely been about the level of cruelty the US is willing to go in the name of security, even if the situation is of their own doing. Although, these films have also done a sloppy job at properly dramatizing that core idea. And then there’s the female characters, of which there are only two. Catherine Keener thanklessly shows up for two or three scenes as a government official who gives Matt the OK to do what he needs to do. Isabela Moner gets more screen time as Isabela Reyes, the girl getting kidnapped, but there still isn’t much she’s given to do other that scream and be thrown around by the male characters, which is a shame considering she has brief moments that shows a compelling screen presence, but it’s never really utilized.
This is stuff we’ve seen in Taylor Sheridan’s work before, the disempowering of female characters is a big part of Sicario and Wind River, and he also has a tendency to feature people-of-color in supporting roles with little agency and are mostly there to serve the arc of the white protagonist. It’s a shame since I think he has really strong attributes as a writer. He’s brilliant in setting the stage for thrilling action sequences, and he knows how to craft characters that are endearing and interesting. That latter part, however, is sorely missed in both Sicario films. The characters in these films don’t feel like characters, they feel like symbols, metaphors, walking cautionary tales, and chess pieces carefully and purposefully placed for whatever effect he wants at any given moment.
What made Sheridan’s work in films like Hell or High Water, and even Wind River, despite its faults, is that they felt like very focused, personal stories within recognizable genre conventions about actual people who have their own individual thoughts, feelings, and complexities. At the end of the day, I’ll still remember Jeff Bridges’ Marcus waiting for retirement in Hell or High Water or Gil Birmingham’s turn as a grieving father, Martin, in Wind River, but I won’t remember a thing about anyone here. And the few moments of warmth such as a scene where Alejandro and Isabela take rest at a home owned by a deaf couple, are too few and far between. The Sicario films seem to be Sheridan’s attempts at idea-driven narratives, but the problem is that his “big ideas” are all half-baked and his limited perspective only hurts those ideas even more.
For people who were fans of the original, I don’t think there’s anything about this that would turn you off. Stefano Sollima brings an ice-cold detached quality to the filmmaking, and the cinematography from the always reliable Dariusz Wolski is perfectly in line with the visual language set by Deakins in the first film. The action is brutal and unflinching. Even the score done by Hildur Guðnadóttir, who collaborated with Jóhannsson before, brings her own flavor while paying into the ominous, droning soundscape already established. The craftsmanship here is more than solid, and if the first one was your jam, I honestly don’t see where this falters.
However, Sicario: Day of the Soldado wasn’t my cup of tea. I suppose I can appreciate the fact that this one at least owns its more troublesome elements, and after a while, I found its relentless nihilism somewhat amusing, so I guess I enjoyed this more than the first. I can see what these movies are trying to do, and I can admire it, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired. Sure, it might be considered timely – and perhaps even necessary – that we have a film that shows the extremely dark and recklessly immoral side of the US’ attempts at security and law enforcement, but considering that a huge chunk of the American population will only find this immorality worth celebrating, maybe it’s time to rethink the strategy.