Sicario (2015, Dir. Denis Villeneuve):
You should move to a small town, somewhere the rule of law still exists. You will not survive here. You are not a wolf, and this is a land of wolves now.
— Benecio del Toro, Sicario
Denis Villeneuve is quite the serious fellow — for proof, one need only watch his two previous films, Enemy (2014) and Prisoners (2013), which tackled such light, frothy subjects as child murder, torture, and killing off your own doppelganger. His directorial hand is sure yet heavy: Enemy, based on the José Saramago novel The Double, ignores the book’s wry, almost winsome fatalism in favor of murky dread (Saramago’s story didn’t have sex clubs and spiders), while Prisoners is all but choked by its characters’ rage, grief and obsessions. A fun time for all, his films are not.
Fortunately, Villeneuve has finally found a vehicle large enough to support his pretensions with Sicario, for what could be heavier than the drug wars that have devastated the U.S.-Mexico border? From the very first shot, in which a sun-bleached Arizona suburb is interrupted by the ominous black figures of a SWAT team converging on a drug lord’s hideout, unease is the name of the game. High-strung and literally shell-shocked after that initial raid leads to a booby-trapped explosion, FBI agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) is eager to strike a blow against the cartels, and gets her chance when her agency hooks her up with a clandestine group headed by Matt (Josh Brolin). Dressed in a T-shirt and flip-flops, equipped with the bluster and bonhomie of an SEC football coach, Matt is seemingly without agency affiliation or obligation to the rule of law. “What’s our objective?” Macer asks him (it won’t be the only time she asks), and he grins back: “To wildly overreact.” Her directive might be to watch and learn, but the whole operation stinks like a rotten fish from the start, as Matt and his merry band of mercenaries bypass El Paso and dart across the border to cartel-infested Juárez, where headless bodies hanging from highway overpasses is a common sight. Along for the ride is the mysterious Alejandro (Benecio del Toro); his silk shirts and cowboy-white jacket suggest that he is just as out of place as Macer, but his gnomic pronouncements imply that he knows exactly what the hell is going on. “You’re asking me how a watch works,” he sighs at her. “For now just keep an eye on the time.”
Sicario is a spring-loaded trap of a narrative, and much of the movie’s impact is derived from watching the action unfold, anticipating the trap at any moment. As she slowly comes to realize what she’s gotten herself into, Macer must endure a far-from-sentimental education about the true nature of the War on Drugs, where the most vicious enemies are merely bedfellows, and immoral acts are carried out daily with an eye on the end game. Villeneuve can ramp up the tension effortlessly: one sequence in which Matt, Macer and Alenjandro carry out a dangerous extraction of a drug lord from a Juárez prison builds the suspense to a near-unbearable pitch, as their vans scurry like deadly ants through blasted urban landscapes, ominous yet vulnerable. A shocking ambush on the highway right at the U.S.-Mexican border is shot with precision and stomach-churning suddenness. Villeneuve has been mentioned as a potential future James Bond director, and while his corrosive style seems a far cry from the world of 007, one can salivate about the idea of a Bond film with visceral impact as well as panache. Speaking of Bond, cinematographer Roger Deakins, fresh off his recent triumph in Skyfall, goes all in on the blasted sun and shadows of the film’s locations — while the narrative constantly threatens to go elliptical, the movie’s look is never less than pellucid, even when we sink into night and figurative Hell alongside our mercenaries as they march into a drug runner’s tunnel, descending below the horizon and into pitch blankness.
“Nothing will make sense to your American ears, and you will doubt everything that we do, but in the end you will understand.”
As our moral compass as well as the center of the movie, Macer is out of her depth throughout, and Blunt seems a bit out of her depth too. She’s nominally convincing as a grizzled FBI operator, but far less persuasive as a naive Alice tumbling down a rabbit hole of corruption. Brow perpetually wrinkled, on the defensive, all atremble every time she lights up a cigarette, she’s too wary a presence for us to accept her getting steamrolled by the deceptions that Matt and Alejandro throw in her face. Of course, you could argue that’s part of the movie’s message: this game has been rigged from the start, and anything resembling a conscience is going to be trumped by the sheer absence of scruples displayed by the powers that be. As the operation draws closer to its climax, our supposed heroes’ firepower and military precision grow wildly hyperbolic, as if we’re witnessing a wasp getting toasted by a bazooka, and Macer’s earlier question looms large: What’s the true objective here?
The answer turns out to be something more and something less than what we’re expecting. “Sicario,” as a title card helpfully explains to us, refers to zealots in ancient Jerusalem who hunted and killed the Roman invaders, and more pertinently, it’s the Mexican word for “hit man.” A late twist pulls the focus towards del Toro’s Alejandro, and the very personal nature of his mission is both a chilling comment on geopolitical expedience — the enemy of my enemy is my friend — and also a bit of a comedown. It’s always a treat to see del Toro in an understated performance (his least mannered work in ages), and he can steal a scene with a simple husky line reading or a fatherly hand laid on Blunt’s shoulder, as he invites her (and us) into intimacy and complicity. Nevertheless, it’s disappointing to see the coiled tension of the film shunted aside in favor of Steven Seagal-style action moves and “eye for an eye” payback.
A balanced world view isn’t in Villeneuve’s repertoire; his films are thunderous statements of outrage, atrocity piling atop atrocity, all sides responsible for their share of blood. Sicario is similarly blunt, and rightfully so, it seems, for what could be more blunt and unforgiving than what goes down at the border? Still, the more you think about the movie, the more the strange inflexibility at its heart lingers: we’re meant to feel moral outrage at what the War on Drugs has led these people to do, over and over, the end. There’s no character movement here, only polemic punctuated by torture and executions. That Villenueve is so expert at coordinating the latter doesn’t stop you from wishing he could loosen up a bit, and mix a bit more play and ambivalence with his intentions. The movie concludes with two scenes: one with children playing soccer on a dusty Juárez field, the sound of automatic gunfire lingering in the distance, and another with del Toro nestling his gun under Blunt’s chin. Within those two scenes lies the extremes tof Villeneuve’s style — he can be evocative and haunting when he wants to be, but he can’t resist putting a gun to our heads to make his point. “This is a land of wolves,” Alejandro says. While we can scarcely argue with the statement, the movie’s pummeling approach drives the point home as subtly as a sledgehammer. A game of rigged dice can be fun to watch, but it’s impossible to forget that we’re still being played.
