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Sicario

6/15/2016

12 Comments

 

3.33
​B+

An FBI agent working at the Mexican border is given a chance to go after bigger fish by shadowy government forces.

Directed by Denis Villeneuve
Starring Emily Blunt, Benicio del Toro, and Josh Brolin
Initial Review by Phil Crone

Picture
At the heart of Sicario is a complicated question: What is victory in the face of an unwinnable war?  Is it the small wins that serve as a beacon of hope to spread from this epicenter?  Or is it in the very understanding that the war cannot be won, but a more favorable outcome can be achieved?  This serves as the central conflict between the idealistic FBI agent Kate and the ever-pragmatic CIA agent Matt and is the driving force behind the action of Sicario.

Much of the first act is spent setting up this world, giving the audience an understanding of the dire straits border towns are in.  The proxy for the viewer is Kate, an FBI agent in the kidnap rescue division.  Opening with a tactical mission for her team immediately gives us the impression that Kate is no pushover when she makes it into Juarez, which is where our story begins in earnest.  Right from the opening aerial shot over serene El Paso & dilapidated Juarez, we know we’re dealing with two different worlds here.  The sounds of Juarez as the task force drives through are littered with gunfire.  Multiple bodies, decapitated, hang from a bridge.  Yet, we see the townspeople go about their business in the meantime.  This is commonplace, and that jarring juxtaposition of people playing games while the bullets fly is just another day in Juarez, or any other border town that has become a nexus for drug trafficking.  That point is further driven home by the shootout on the bridge, which “won’t even make the papers in El Paso.”  Kate and the viewer now know this is the war we are dealing with.


Matt is very much playing a shell game with Kate, but we understand why when we get to the bank scene.  Matt is playing the long game, understanding that bank fraud charges aren’t the endgame here.  He tries to keep Kate in the dark as long as possible, knowing that she has the chance to blow this entire operation up before it even gets off the launch pad.  And, not surprisingly, she almost does, making herself a target in the process.  Much like Matt’s bait, cartel underling Manuel Diaz, made himself known and thus exposing the cartel to further damage, Kate does the same thing by going into the bank and putting herself on camera.  As was the case in her kidnapping division, Kate was small-minded, going for the victory over Diaz and not the real power players.  This was the dilemma with Kate’s character all along.  After the bank incident, it snaps into focus why she was part of the kidnapping division to begin with: the victories are small, the moral lines are well-defined, and the payoff is immediate.  (It even explains why she’s a habitual smoker given that immediate payoff.)  It’s the same thing in the bank – there’s something illegal, let’s catch the bad guy!  And all it almost cost was her life.

The shootout at the border tunnel brings Matt’s full plan to fruition.  Matt isn’t looking to end the war on drugs – he’s looking to consolidate power.  It’s a tactic we’ve seen used throughout history by various governments, understanding that while order may not be the optimal solution over peace, it is the best solution realistically.  Kate, not surprisingly, reacts poorly to this.  It’s their job to stop the bad guys, right?  Well, bad news, the bad guys won already, and drugs are going nowhere.  Kate and Matt are fighting different wars here, with Kate fighting to stop drugs and Matt fighting to stop the violence.  After the trip through Juarez, it’s very difficult to not side with Matt and his crusade.

Matt’s conduit for consolidating power comes in the form of Alejandro, a man who works “for Mexico,” and by that, we mean a hitman for the cartel with the best chance at consolidating power, which actually makes him the title character of the movie.  “Sicario” makes no illusions to Alejandro being a good guy though.  He has no problem using Silvio, one of surely many people who have no choice but to be caught up in the drug war and seen as nothing but pawns, and subsequently disposing of him once he’s outlived his usefulness.  We then get a very well-made scene of Alejandro invading druglord Fausto’s compound and serving a little bit of vengeance in his own right.  Alejandro’s path of destruction only underlines what we already know: this is a war where victory won’t be glorious.  Innocent people will die.  However, Matt is choosing the few – namely, Silvio and Fausto’s family – over the many – seemingly the entire city of Juarez.

The final scene between Kate & Alejandro is a great final face-off of the ideological differences here.  As Kate stares down Alejandro from the balcony, she’s making that decision once again – the small victory over the bad guy, or the chance at order over peace.  Kate, ultimately, chooses order.  And as the final scene of Silvio’s child and now widow take part in a soccer game with gunfire echoing in the background, who can say Kate didn’t choose right.

“Sicario” is a damn-near masterpiece of revelation into the war on drugs taking place to our south.  It’s a war that we’ve been fighting ever since Nancy Reagan asked us to “Just Say No.”  Appealing to the people has not worked.  Arrests have not worked.  Tightening up the border hasn’t worked.  Sometimes, redefining the objective of “victory” is the best outcome we can hope for.  That’s Matt’s philosophy, and given the carnage in Juarez & in the border tunnel, it just might be Kate’s philosophy now too.

+ Excellent performances from Blunt, Brolin, & Del Toro

+ Directing is spot-on, putting the horrors of Juarez front-and-center as well as creating tense action sequences

+ “Takes a bold stance” regarding a situation that isn’t easy to solve.

Grade: A+
12 Comments
Admin
6/15/2016 02:47:15 pm

Replies to the initial review.

Reply
Bryan
6/15/2016 11:55:49 pm

"Sometimes, redefining the objective of “victory” is the best outcome we can hope for."

Do you really believe this?

Reply
Jon
6/21/2016 03:10:17 am

I understood Alejandro to be working for the Colombians, not some Mexican cartel who could consolidate operations. By taking the drug trade out of Mexico and giving it back to Colombia, the idea was that there would be some kind of order, but Colombia in the 90's was like Mexico today. You had it right with unwinnable war. The solution is not to fight it in the first place. Basically what I'm saying is that I should be able to buy heroin at CVS.

Reply
Jon
6/21/2016 03:11:58 am

On the ending soccer game, I took that as a sign that nothing has, or will, change. That Kate signed away her ethics for nothing. Everything will continue, a new boss with a new family will emerge, and El Paso will continue to feel like a different planet than Juarez.

Reply
Bryan
6/15/2016 02:54:22 pm

My notes on this were slim, so another short review as usual...

Sicario started at an A for me, walls full of bodies and an intense car chase. My level of intrigue and confusion was sky high trying to figure out who was doing what and everyone's plan.

However, Sicario quickly slid into a snooze fest as unexciting. The time and energy between important scenes was zero. I had no emotional attachment to any character and by the end I didn't care what happened.

I'm not as mad as Phil about "Just Say No." I was over the effectiveness of that campaign long before I saw this movie.

C, meh.

Reply
Phil
6/15/2016 04:41:57 pm

I'm not mad about "Just Say No," I'm just pointing out how ineffective it really was.

Reply
Jon
6/16/2016 03:15:56 am

About 40 minutes into Sicario, FBI agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) walks into a room full of CIA operatives, US Marshalls, and assorted guns for hire. Her ponytail and lithe figure are immediately out of place amongst the barrel chested, heavily bearded men who are supposedly her coworkers. In addition to the obvious gender outlier, she also becomes an organizational outlier. She and her partner, well-groomed members of the upstanding FBI, are concerned with rules and protocols, while their CIA overseer, played by Josh Brolin, is introduced being deliberately vague, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and flip-flops. The difference between the shadowy areas of the government and the parts exposed to sunlight are further deconstructed in Sicario, Denis Villeneuve’s thriller about the extra-legal vagaries of drug interdiction. The battle between these two is revealed to be not a battle at all. One side is simply operating on a different set of rules.

Opening on Macer leading a raid on an Arizonan drug house, she and her team are shocked to find a brace of bodies sealed into the house’s framing. They are further shocked when an improvised explosive device suddenly explodes in the backyard. This cartel escalation puts Macer in a mood to step things up, and she leaps at the opportunity to go after senior cartel officials when CIA agent Matt Graver (Brolin) presents the chance to her. As minor members of Graver’s extensive team, Macer and her partner Reggie Wayne (Daniel Kaluuya) are left grasping for information and mission parameters, while secretive Alejandro Gillick (Benicio del Toro) seems to be running things, as he takes the lead in interrogations. Baffled by the mission and the legal latitude Graver and Gillick are using, Macer is left to grapple with her growing doubts about the mission, and her desire to stop nibbling around the edges of the drug trade in exchange for a big catch.

Villeneuve is making a name for himself as a devotee of the morality play thriller. His breakout film, Incendies, placed its characters in impossible situations, blossoming out from a brutal civil war. His follow-up, Prisoners, brought torture to small-town America, placing brutal crimes on the scale against the slim possibility of finding an abducted child. Sicario gives the viewer another moral scenario to weigh, and it might be the grayest of Villeneuve’s career. The characters spend a fair amount of time in Ciudad Juarez, and the town is littered with corpses, including bodies strung up from bridges as a show of intimidation. Against that kind of depravity, what are the rules and jurisdiction that Macer is concerned with really worth? Macer is the clichéd lieutenant, demanding the badge and gun of the reckless cop, thrust into the lead and deprived of real authority. The lieutenant always comes around to the reckless cop because, as Homer Simpson would say, the cop gets results, but what if on the way to those results, a shootout erupted in a traffic jam, or children were put at deadly risk? Sicario asks about the limit to getting results, and then proceeds to ask if those results are worth getting in the first place.

Graver and Gillick’s methods ultimately overtake Macer’s protestations, and as they exert more power over her, Sicario shifts to Gillick’s film. A film from Macer’s perspective is unique, while a film about a deadly operative working in the shadows is plentiful. Once Gillick takes over, Sicario becomes significantly less interesting. His vendetta against the Juarez cartel simply isn’t breaking new ground. The climax has nothing to do with her, just as the thrilling intro, which the film never tops, has nothing to do with Gillick. Split between those two perspective, Sicario loses sight of the moral quandary at its center.

Reply
Jon
6/16/2016 03:20:52 am

I reposted this from an earlier Side Piece if it sounds off my usual tone for jefe picks. I'll have more to add later, but Green Room took longer to review than I thought it would.

Reply
Jon
6/16/2016 03:16:19 am

The tonal shift doesn’t detract from the onscreen expertise from all sides. This is Villeneuve’s most setpiece-heavy film, and in the several standoffs and stalking, he acquaints himself well with spacing and orientation. These setpieces are all impossibly tense as well. Coupled with expert cinematographer Roger Deakins, Sicario retains a lived-in, gritty look throughout. The environment is used thematically well, as the intense brightness of daylight is just as obscuring as darkest night. Blunt continues to establish herself as a credible lead, following up her excellent turn in Edge of Tomorrow with a similarly strong role. As frustrating as the shift to Gillick is, Del Toro is no slouch, effectively stealing the film. He infuses a world-weariness into the character that turns into cold resolution when the bulletproof vest comes on. He has a habit of invading the personal space of those who he’s trying to intimidate, and it works every time, forcing the viewer back in their seat as well as the intimidate-ee.

Villeneuve hasn’t quite broken through for me into the upper echelon of directors, but he gets closer with Sicario. The difficult choices presented by Taylor Sheridan’s script are a good fit for Villeneuve’s oeuvre, and the tension repeatedly reaches nigh-unbearable levels. Blunt and Del Toro are nicely complemented, though the film turns too much into a commando-style assassination plot. As an examination of the drug war, it remains noncommittal and provides no pat answers, befitting the intractability of the problem. Sicario flirts with greatness and novelty, but it has to settle for high competence. B

Reply
Lane
6/18/2016 01:04:18 pm

Now that 2016 is half over, I’ve finally been able to slowly catch up on all of the movies from last year that are just now being released on DVD and on-demand. And amongst the 2015 crop, which generally wasn’t a great year for film, I don’t think, “Sicario” was one that stood out.

With six months of reflection and spring awards season now clearly in the rearview mirror, I’m going to finally go out on a limb (because I know you’ve all been waiting with baited breath) and say that the three best films of 2015 (not in order, necessarily) were “The Revenant,” “Mad Max,” and “Sicario.” “Inside Out” was nipping at their heels.

Why do I put “Sicario” in this group? Well, first, I think it’s the best narcotics trafficking movie since “Traffic.” That film showed the tangled mess that is our national war on drugs and the human cost of the war. “Sicario” didn’t dabble with humanity quite so much, tending to stay in Tom Clancy territory with CIA cover ups, black ops, and Benicio del Toro playing a very Benicio del Toro type role to build mystery and tension and do the hard work of storytelling. But the political intrigue was still, well, intriguing and kept me watching. And when del Toro’s character shoots the kids at the end I immediately texted a friend who I knew had recently seen the movie with a “Can you believe they went there!?” type of text, and it’s not every movie that elicits that kinds of response.

The trip to Juarez was the second best scene of 2015 (behind the opening battle scene in “The Revenant”) and really had me on the edge of my seat the entire time. It was beautifully shot and spoke volumes about the weirdness and insanity of a war zone that is, literally, one bridge away from the United States. The ease with which the government sheds its own restraints and rule of law by driving 500 yards should make us shiver and there was this mix of beauty and horror and suspense that Villeneuve captured brilliantly in that progression.

There were other great aspects of this film (bodies in walls, anyone?), but the film wasn’t perfect by any means and, as mentioned by others, lost steam as it rolled on. I thought Emily Blunt’s character was completely one dimensional and boring, and I like Emily Blunt, so I blame the writing and not the acting. I was listening to a podcast recently that argued the film would have been more interesting if Blunt’s character had been male. The podcasters felt that the character was Hollywood’s need to check off the diversity box by including a strong female role, but that it would have been a more interesting character if say, Ethan Hawke had revised his “Training Day” role. I think it’s a worthy argument.

In the end, what keeps “Sicario” from an upper echelon film for me is that, after a promising start, it dumps a focus on a human story to tell a story that I think I played in “Call of Duty” one time. I understand the need to reach the 17 year old boy demographic, because there’s a 17 year old boy inside all of us who used to be 17 year old boys, but I need a little more from a film for it to do more than stand out. Was it a great film for 2015? Yes, absolutely. Was it an all time great drug trafficking film? Close, but not quite.

Grade: B+

Reply
Jon
6/21/2016 03:15:38 am

I think with the casting of Emily Blunt, Villeneuve was deliberately trying to evoke something like Silence of the Lambs, another breaking-up-of-the-boys'-club movie. A standout scene is Kate walking into the briefing room full of Blackwater-types, burly chested men whose torso probably weighs more than all of Kate. This is one particular boys club that needs breaking up, but it'll take more than Kate to do so.

Reply
JR
10/11/2016 04:14:44 pm

Great movie... definitely a favorite

Reply



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