Sicario is a layered and engrossing film, put together by a team that includes cinematographer Roger Deakins (No Country For Old Men) It doesn’t skint on the thrills and scraps, but there is heart and wit here too. But it’s a hunger never wholly satisfied. “It’s just going to create other monsters”. “The drug cartel in Mexico is something that’s so close to us and I hope people will see this movie and start to talk about it as much as we talk about ISIS that’s halfway across the planet”.
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It opens brilliantly, however, with a gorgeously shot set-piece action scene.
Emily Blunt, Josh Brolin and Benicio Del Toro star in Sicario.
If you don’t pay attention to facts when it comes to murder rates and the drug war and border issues – and hardly anyone does, as Donald Trump’s campaign has established – then it’s easy to assume that Villeneuve and Sheridan are depicting harsh reality, rather than attacking our collective limbic system with a pileup of nightmarish images. Around Blunt, veterans Josh Brolin and – especially – Benicio Del Toro are enigmatic and menacing as all hell. But what this ultimately means is Mercer sits out many of the action scenes, and so despite being the ostensible lead, rather struggles to make herself relevant to the story in its latter stages. “I’ve done many characters that live in that world, the drug wars and the drug world, but this one had a different angle”. She just Dixie Chicked herself. “This took off layers of skin”, Blunt said at The Modern after party, in her poised British.
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Don’t miss del Toro in a “Long Story Short” segment with Jimmy Fallon. Villeneuve would often cut Del Toro’s dialogue, stripping the part down as he realized the actor did more with less. There is an inherent intelligence to the actress that gives her characters, even in repose, an inner life that no screenwriter could have written. In one of the film’s most harrowing sequences, the pair make their claustrophobic way through a rat-filled pipe to reach freedom; Sicario’s climax features a similarly-located mission in the opposite direction, and both films end on quite a grim note. Or does his character ambiguously walk the line between good and bad?
