Sicario is Denis Villeneuve’s critically-acclaimed crime thriller about Mexican cartels and narcoterrorism. I went into the film only knowing that Benicio del Toro was in it, that it had done well enough in its limited-market launch to green-light a sequel along with the wide release, and it was “intense.”
I’m a little curious about Villeneuve, because he’s slated to be in the chair for the upcoming Blade Runner sequel. Given the state of Hollywood, this can only end in disaster, but it’s still something I will watch car-crash style, for the same reason I always click on the comments section of an article on a school shooting, and never, ever should.
Sicario was not what I’d call “intense.” It actually rolled out slowly, with an interesting yet convoluted story of inter-departmental confusion, where the protagonist junior FBI agent played by Emily Blunt gets dropped into a mysterious interdepartmental task force run by Josh Brolin, with del Toro as a “special advisor” to some unnamed agency. The bits of the backstory are slowly put in place as the team goes to get the big cartel boss, antics ensue, etc.
The film largely plods down a single set of rails, a quiet journey punctuated with the occasional intensity of a gunfight or explosion. It was oddly muted for a blockbuster movie though, and did not stray far from the central plot as far as b-story or subplot. It was refreshing in the sense that it did not follow the Save the Cat formula religiously, and trot out Blunt’s love interest exactly on page 30 of the script. But for a 121-minute movie, it did plod on endlessly.
My main issue with the movie is that it was designed as a sort of Zero Dark Thirty of Mexican narcoterrorism, which makes me question its value. I’m not saying this stuff doesn’t happen in real life — it does — but I feel like this movie unconsciously enforces the stereotype of Mexicans/bad Americans-with-guns/good. It seems like the kind of thing Donald Trump fans would point at as evidence that we need to build that wall. It wasn’t gung-ho about it, like a straight-to-VHS Chuck Norris movie of 1986 would be about the evils of Communism. But there was an underlying tone there that seemed to reinforce this.
And like I said, this stuff does happen. There were hostages in Iran, ala Argo, but that movie (which I thought was well-done at the time, until I really thought about it) reinforces this stereotype that everyone in Iran is a flag-burning terrorist, when really, almost everyone in Iran is just a person, nothing more. It makes me uneasy that a huge stable of American films, when viewed from a distance, are nothing more than American propaganda. If that’s what people want, and that’s what they pay for, fine. But when thinking of an art form with so many possibilities and so few slots for screen time, it makes me question the value of the work.