Within the first seconds of Denis Villeneuve’s crime drama the audience is informed: “In Mexico, sicario means hitman.” The meaning of that message remains relatively cryptic until the film’s third act and keeps the audience’s head spinning until that reveal and then sends the audiences hearts into an icy chill.
But what is Sicario about. The film centers on an FBI agent named Kate (Emily Blunt, sporting a pretty realistic American accent) who is recruited to work for the Department of Defense’s Matt Graver (Josh Brolin).
Graver is a mysterious government man who is less of a shadow and more of a sloppy goon – sporting a t-shirt and flip-flops for most of the film. The real man in the shadows is Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro, stunningly shrewd and vague) – a former prosecutor with a penchant for torture and violence.
Together Kate, Graver and Alejandro are assigned to massively disrupt the drug cartels in Juarez. Sicario marks the third achievement for Villeneuve in two years.
His most recent two films, Prisoners – one of the best and one of the darkest films of 2013 – and Enemy – a psychosexual avant-garde thriller with a great dual performance by Jake Gyllenhaal at the center – were dark and atmospheric and each greatly disturbed me. Little did I know that they were only practice for Sicario.
Villeneuve directs with such understated verve that most of the film broils with tension even when apparently little seems to be going on. The film moves comfortably from war on drugs drama, to government conspiracy thriller, to action thriller and rocks between these three so adeptly and so nimbly that the audience is constantly on edge and stays on edge until the credits roll.
The supporting cast is also packed with great performers: Victor Garber, Jeffrey Donovan, Jon Bernthal, and Daniel Kaluuya all do brilliant turns as men on opposite sides of the law.
As for the leads, Blunt plays a character who’s an almost less naive Clarice Starling: a woman in a world of men who is either too stubborn to acknowledge that she’s a minority, or too focused at the task at hand to care.
She wisely veers from being the character shouting orders and being serious with a capital ‘S’. Rather she plays Kate as a dogged agent who takes on more than she – or any human being in her position – can chew.
Brolin is excellently smarmy as Graver. He’s so laid back, so chill and so apathetic that the audience always knows that there is something up with him. We know we’re supposed to distrust him, but his who-gives-a-damn attitude is constantly disarming.
Del Toro, however, is the real gem in this movie. Every scene with Del Toro crackles and simmers with tension just by his presence. Essentially by the end of the first act, if Del Toro is on screen you know something serious is about to happen.
The film, an original script by Taylor Sheridan, plays like a Michael Mann thriller without the theme of “good guys and bad guys have the same dedication, but use it for different purposes.”
This film portrays a cruel world with characters that are trying to be even crueler than their surroundings.
Often times in films about drugs, the audience is seldom if ever reminded about the people who are really hurt by cartels: actual citizens of the countries in which these drugs flow. This movie features a running subplot of a small Mexican boy and his father that seems to have almost no point until the very last frames of the film. And boy, what a payoff it is.
One of the more technical things that stand out in the film is the subtle camera work by Roger Deakins. He captures landscapes – urban, suburban and desert – with such understated beauty and lighting that many frames from the movie would be right at home in a photo gallery.
Deakins even manages to shoot a night vision scene without falling into Call of Duty cliché. The film is shot, written, directed and acted with such unflinching conviction that the movie at times induces wincing and an urge to at times cover your eyes. But it’s a film well-worth looking at.
Sicario is easily one of the best films of the year and became an immediate entry in my top ten list of the year, thus far.
Brian Laughran
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