Early in Sicario, after a particularly nasty raid by the FBI on an Arizona stash-house, there is a wide shot of the tough-looking black-clad-and-armored team puking their guts out in the house's backyard. It's not just Emily Blunt's Kate Macy, the team leader and our main protagonist, who has been made sick by the violence of the Drug Wars, it's everybody on her team. Sicario recognizes the toll that this violence has on every single person who comes in contact with it. Unlike so many of today's action movies, it takes violence seriously. Later, when Kate is forced to fire her weapon for the first time, she reacts with the proper disgust, shock, and attendant profanities that go with it. Director Denis Villeneuve never lets it becomes easy for her, or for the audience, to stomach the violence. As you process that, the movie asks, how much are we willing to tolerate from this war? For how long can we look away?
At the beginning of the movie, Kate is a rookie, a field agent who has just done 5 drug-related raids and never investigated a case herself. She knows next to nothing about the drug trade or the major players involved, but she is determined to get in there and take them down. In other words, she's the perfect audience surrogate to guide us through the drug war as she gets assigned to an inter-agency task force designed to take down the head of a major cartel. When she learns something new about this brutal business, we do too. It's a simple conceit.
Alejandro (Benicio del Toro), a mysterious man who is part of this special task force, tells Kate that "nothing will make sense to your American ears, and you will doubt everything we do, but in the end, you will understand." For both Kate and the audience, that promise is more than fulfilled by the end of the film. Sicario teaches you everything you wanted to know, as well as many things you didn't, about how this war on drugs is conducted.
The horrors of the war only begin to make themselves clear after Kate's first trip to Mexico, where she essentially gets dragged along to kidnap a cartel leader without her knowledge. In retaliation, she and her squad are attacked on the bridge between the U.S and Mexico. The sequence starts with a seemingly innocuous traffic jam, just the usual border crossing snafu, but it suddenly strikes Kate that not everything is ok. Her face goes white; she starts to sweat, but nothing happens. Eventually, she learns that there are men with guns trailing her. Calmly, Alejandro, who had been riding with her, opens his door, gets out of his car and, along with an US Army team, shoots them down. The violence stops as suddenly as it began. In the brief chaos that ensues, Kate is forced to shoot a suspect herself. The single shot she fires is one she will not forget for the rest of her life. Emily Blunt absolutely nails the creeping fear that grips Kate as she realizes the mess she has just stepped into. (In an early, painfully ironic scene, Kate is practically forced by her bosses to volunteer for this mission since she cannot, by law, be assigned to another agency.)
Aside from Blunt, the MVPs of the sequence, and of the film as a whole, are the editor, Joe Walker, and cinematographer, Roger Deakins. The buildups to the acts of violence, to the raid at the beginning and the shootout on the bridge, tend to last longer than the acts themselves. The tension Walker builds is unbearable. While nothing happens for most of the film, there's always the sense that things are about to go horribly wrong. It's this constant anticipation, so carefully cultivated within the film, that will set audiences on edge. One has to credit the editor for that marvelous feat. As for the cinematography by one of my all-time favorite DPs of all time? At first I didn't even know it was him who shot it, but as I watched the movie I was so entranced that I stuck around for the credits just to see who this magician was who was able to compose such horrifying pictures of the war on drugs. Of course it had to be Deakins! Anyways, the man shot this in full horror mode, a mode that includes several eerily steady tracking shots like something out of The Shining that just build on Walker's editorial effects. Plus, there's a nighttime infrared/night-vision-goggles mission that tries to one-up the terrifying finale in Bin Laden's compound that was the crowning setpiece of Zero Dark Thirty. For fans of ZD30, Sicario should be great, as it is practically that but with a laser focus, zeroing in on a few intense days of our protagonists work instead of focusing on her decade-long hunt.
One of the most fascinating things about the movie is the soundtrack, and not just the music which is eery and quiet most of the time, like that of a horror movie. I'm talking about the sound effects. The gunshots in particular. Let me be clear: they are loud. Every time a shot is fired in this movie, it matters. The bullets leave their mark, not only physically and emotionally for those involved (including the audience), but also sonically. Again this indicates the seriousness with which Villeneuve treats violence, but he layers it with one more bit of sour commentary. He makes sure to show how the sharp sounds of gunfire in the soundtrack, so disruptive to the audience safe in their comfortable theater seats, barely register with the residents of Mexico who must hear them every day. For them it's simply how things work. A man rhythmically bouncing a ball against a wall barely skips a beat when hearing a shootout, while a few kids in the middle of a soccer match are just learning about the harsh reality of their environment. They acknowledge the sound briefly, but then they keep on playing. Life goes on for them as it must go on for the audience once the film ends. But there's that nagging sound of gunfire ringing in our memories long after we leave the theater, a constant reminder of the human sacrifice of this ongoing war.
Verdict- 3.5/4
Sicario (2015) 2h 01min. R.
Random Thoughts
- Still think Emily Blunt should be a superhero.
- Josh Brolin is in this, playing Emily Blunt's CIA boss, a man who does not give a damn about the war or the violence inflicted by it. His fuck you flip-flops are a costuming detail that say everything you need to know about him.
