ANCHOR INTRO: The term Sicario refers to a hitman or assassin, and the new film Sicario looks at how people on both sides of the border and the law are perpetuating a cycle of violence. KPBS film critic Beth Accomando has this review. TAG: Get more of Beth’s reviews on the KPBS Cinema Junkie Podcast on iTunes. Kate Macer is an FBI agent who doesn’t feel like she’s making a dent in the drug war. Then she’s asked to volunteer for a special task force. CLIP State department is pulling an agent with cartel experience… what’s our objective?... To dramatically overreact. Sicario is an intense but contemplative drama about the moral choices one must make when trying to take down an enemy that respects no bounds. The film’s artistically restrained – never resorting to shakycam or fast cuts to heighten tension. Instead it develops a central character that is slowly having her ideals chipped away, and presents a commentary on what appears to be the impossibility of breaking our current cycle of violence. Sicario is being sold as an action film but it resonates with a thoughtful exploration of whether the means justify the ends. Beth Accomando, KPBS News.
Companion viewing
“Traffic” (2000)
“City of God” (2003)
“Cartel Land” (2015)
The term Sicario refers to a hit man or assassin, and the new film “Sicario” (opening Saturday throughout San Diego) looks at how people on both sides of the border and the law are perpetuating a cycle of violence.
Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) is an FBI agent who doesn’t feel like she’s making a dent in the drug war. Then she’s asked to volunteer for a special task force by Matt Graver (Josh Brolin). When she inquires what the objective will be, Matt simply responds, “To dramatically overreact.”
Kate immediately has doubts about what she’s gotten herself into. Matt is cagey and secretive in his conversations with her, and she’s especially suspicious of Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro), a quiet, enigmatic man who claims to be a former lawyer from Colombia.
The plan, as vaguely defined for Kate, involves using one cartel boss living on the U.S. side of the border to flush out a bigger boss living in Mexico. But almost immediately, Kate realizes that Matt and Alejandro are not proceeding by the book. They, however, ask her how much progress she has been able to make sticking to guidelines and procedures.
Sicario is an intense but contemplative drama about the moral choices one must make when trying to take down an enemy that respects no bounds.
The film’s artistically restrained, thanks to the talents of director Denis Villeneuve and cinematographer Roger Deakins. So the film never resorts to shakycam or fast cuts to heighten tension. Instead, it develops a central character that is slowly having her ideals chipped away, and presents a commentary on what appears to be the impossibility of breaking our current cycle of violence.
Villeneuve makes the refreshing choice to keep much of the violence off-screen or implied. We see the consequences of violence in Internet photos and victims’ bodies on display at crime scenes. But in a few key scenes involving Alejandro’s extracting information from people, the violence is off screen and in one ominous instance left disturbingly to our imaginations.
The script by Taylor Sheridan may be the weakest link in the film, falling back on some familiar tropes to tell his border tale of drugs and violence. The strength of the film lies in the performances of the three leads and the low-key manner in which Villeneuve directs the brutal and emotionally grueling story.
One of the problems I had with the film is the choice of having a female character as the emotional touchstone for the audience. I applaud the choice of having a strong, central female character yet she’s not really the catalyst in the story; she’s only reacting to what’s going on around her rather than being the one to move the story forward.
Plus, she’s being used by the film for essentially stereotypical reasons since a woman is always the one to rely emotions and display sensitivity. What might have been more innovative would have been to make either the Alejandro or Matt characters female and make Kate’s character male. That would be going against the gender stereotypes but also perhaps against the reality of who tends to be in charge in the male dominated worlds of the FBI and CIA.
But Blunt gives such a finely calibrated performance that the emotional clichés can be forgiven.
As cinematographer Roger Deakins noted in the press materials, “If you haven’t got a performance or you haven’t got a character that the audience can relate to then you haven’t got a film, you’ve just got wallpaper.”
And “Sicario” does have performances.
Sheridan’s script, however, is good at laying out the moral ambiguity of the world Kate enters. It asks if law enforcement must resort to horrible means to catch people who do horrible things. Kate says no, but she gets little support for that point of view by anyone else in the film save for her partner.
At one point, Alejandro tells her to move to a small, safer town because she is not a wolf and the border has become a land of wolves. Villeneuve and Sheridan don’t try to lay blame for this just on the Mexican drug lords. They implicate the drug users who can’t kick their habits, American politicians and law enforcement for combatting violence with violence, Mexico for corruption that helps to fuel the problem, and more. The tragedy it lays out is basically the horror that we have created and the question it poses – with no answer given – is how do we escape from this cycle of violence?
Adding intensity to the film is Jóhann Jóhannsson’s score. His droning music track is stark and tense. Sometimes it feels like the music booming from a car down the street, not clearly audible but throbbing in a way that you feel it in your body.
“Sicario” (rated R for strong violence, grisly images, and language, and is in English and Spanish with English subtitles) is being sold as an action film but it resonates with a thoughtful exploration of whether the means justify the ends.
