The Story. Watching Sicario makes me feel grateful that I don’t live in Mexico. Now I hope that remark doesn’t make me sound culturally insensitive, but in the movie the director really made the city so unattractive with bare bones houses, dry climate (obviously), corrupt police officers, congested traffic, and, oh, violence. Jakarta seems like shangrila compared to Mexico’s infrastructure. Even though it’s billed as fiction but I’m pretty sure that the gist of the plot were borrowed from real life political shenanigans. As the trailer and opening credit reminds us, Sicario means “hitman” in Mexican and in the pic who it allude to can be quite clear from the start. The protagonist is Arizona-based field FBI agent Kate Macer (eyes of the audience Emily Blunt) who is recruited by shady adviser to the Department of Justice, Matt Graver (Josh Brolin), for a mission to extract the brother of a notorious drug dealer out of Mexico City. During the mission she meets the mysterious Alejandro Gillick (Benicio Del Toro), also from the Justice Department. Shootouts and closed door showdown ensues.
The Breakdown. Dennis Villeneuve is really a director to watch out for: he only got two movies made-in-Hollywood on his resume (Prisoner, Enemy) but in those two highly regarded pics the French-Canadian has shown consistency and fascination to explore the dark side of human nature, wrapped in bleak, gritty, on the nose thrillers. He’s done so again in Sicario, a perhaps too gritty and bleak thriller with this time involving characters more higher up on the food chain, allowing them a kind of carte blanche to exact violence even in public domain, all in the name of Justice. The slaughter in the middle of traffic has perfect buildup, and Villeuneve is lucky to score a heart-pounding score by Johan Johansson (The Theory of Everything) who throughout the pic successfully made the atmosphere quite unsettling. The downside of Sicario is that for those looking for high speed chases and explosions might be dissappointed because the filmmakers are more interested in characters and atmosphere-building, even the last tunnel scene involves shootouts that happens in the distance, camera transfixed to our lovely heroine’s face. Just adjust your expectation before seeing the pic.
The Performance. Talking about our heroine and expectation, honestly I was craving for a kickass role from Blunt going in to the theater, and she did just that in some scenes, but gradually I discovered that the pic it’s not about her showing who’s tougher amidst a group of tough men. There’s a tendency to make the heroine of a movie more courageous, smarter, and badass-er then everyone else, but that’s not the case here: Macer is smart and brave, of course, but here she’s more or less a proxy for the audience who is trying to figure out her specific role in the mission, eventually finding out that she’s merely a pawn in the murky waters of crime prevention. The matter of gender is hardly relevant here. (Though interestingly, I’ve heard that Villeneuve was initially pressured into changing the sex of his protagonist by studio head. Snooze.) But it’s hard to believe that I’m seeing lovely British import Blunt in the role (who shot to stardom as the snickering assistant of Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada) of Macer, but she has shown versatility in the last few years, especially in the badass-ery department showcased perfectly in the sci-fi pic Edge of Tomorrow with Tom Cruise. But enough about Blunt, the real attention-getter here is Del Toro who’s mere stoicism is able to mesmerized and terrorized both quite effectively. From his first scene you can just sense that there’s more that meets the eyes, and it’s all in his disconcerting gaze. Del Toro, with his baggy eyes (though less so here), has always been dripping with charisma and menace ever since he came out as a villain henchman opposite Timothy Dalton’s James Bond in License to Kill, but his droopy eyes also provide enough room for pain and sincerity as is the case in his role as a recovering drug addict in Susan Bier’s Things We Lost in The Fire. It is that mix of intensity and sensivity that made his dinner table scene in Sicario really hard to watch. As for the other cast member, Brolin, as always, inhabits his charming yet brewing with something dangerous character solidly.
The Bottom Line. Sicario is a very grim affair, filled with deadly traffic, walls infested with dead bodies, vicious threats, barbaric torture, personal vendettas, civilian sacrifice, and shootings in the dark. But it also has something to say, especially about the hush hush ways some government would go to in order to curb crime. Just be grateful that you’re not living (innocently) in the middle of it.
3,5 Stars