She glides through the film with steely grace, displaying resolve and vulnerability in equal measure.
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That chaos – or as Brolin’s character refers to it in the movie, the need for America’s national security agencies to “shake the tree” – is exemplified in the movie by highly questionable activities like torturing mid-level cartel lieutenants and dispatching in-house sicarios (an ancient Roman term that essentially translates as “enforcer” or “hit man”) to do off-the-books dirty work. “Enemy” was a mindf*ck of the highest caliber and one that is criminally underrated in the film community.
It’s an ugly picture that Villeneuve and the now-twelve-time-Academy-Award-nominated cinematographer Roger Deakins make sure you never forget with mesmerizingly haunting cinematography that safely guarantees Deakins’ thirteenth nomination within the first five minutes.
It’s the same argument city leaders in the Old West made when they hired lawmen like Wyatt Earp or Seth Bullock to be sheriffs: If you’re fighting heavily armed psychopaths, you better have even tougher S.O.Bs on your side.
“Sicario” follows Kate Macer (Emily Blunt), an Federal Bureau of Investigation agent that is recruited by the shady Matt Graver (Josh Brolin) to work with the even shadier character, Alejandro (Benecio Del Toro). Not a feel-good movie, but a damn good one. She tags along as Matt’s group conducts investigations and mount raids in increasingly legally questionable ways. He changes focus three-quarters of the way through from Kate to another character, and the ending makes most of what precedes it irrelevant.
“Sicario” is full of horrific images: plastic-wrapped bodies in the crawlspace of a suburban home, a family gunned down at the dinner table, a protracted shootout in a traffic jam. It’s a movie about the drug wars set on the U.S.-Mexico border.
Sicario is a violent action thriller that’s almost as inscrutable as its title.
Del Toro is all quiet menace, playing a character you know has a few disgusting event in his past and is capable of brutal acts of violence. I want to play this in how I nod my head or how I look away.’ At times, his portrait of Alejandro is very quiet and internal but then he’ll suddenly be powerful and magnetic. He wrote me a note, we met, and we talked. It was enough for him to agree to move ahead with the project. Del Toro jerks a thumb at his costar Emily Blunt, who’s lounging on the sofa next to him, nodding. She’s constantly anxious Matt and Alejandro’s rule breaking will threaten potential future prosecutions. But it’s not long before she’s as nervous about her colleagues in the field as she is about the criminals they’re presumably targeting.
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The violence is shocking, effective and soaked into the dry brown landscape. One of the best scenes from any movie all year occurs in the film’s first half, when a traffic back-up near the border of Mexico leads to a bloody shoot out. Partnered with Alejandro (Benicio del Toro), a quietly intense Mexican lawyer who slowly begins to introduce Macer to the tactics that will be deployed by their team, the young agent begins to question the outfit’s true motives. But he’s skeptical about America’s war on drugs, seeing it as grimy and futile, its foot soldiers lost among dark moral impossibilities.
