Prisoners was released a few years back and firmly established Denis Villenueve as a name to watch, It was brutal, dark, and gritty in the style of the very best of the crime/mystery/thriller genre and demonstrated that Villenueve had several unique qualities as a filmmaker. Quality adult dramatic thrillers are becoming exceedingly rare as studios increasingly abandon mid-budget productions for bare indies and huge franchises, so when it was announced that Villenueve's follow-up would be set in the drug war with an A-List cast, Sicario became a film to notice.
Emily Blunt stars as Kate, an ace FBI agent who is recruited by a secretive government task force to pursue the drug cartels that are increasingly spreading their operation throughout the southwestern U.S.
The Good: if you saw "Prisoners", (which, if you didn't, go do so) you know that Villenueve can do "tension" as well as anyone making movies today. Short on dialogue, score, and background music, Villenueve employs facial expressions, cinematography and sound to great effect. In sequence after sequence Villenueve lets the tension build to an almost unbearable way before allowing the action to unfold in crisp, well-executed fashion. This interplay between long periods of build up punctuated by violence and action differentiates Sicario from what seems to be the norm today, wherein action, seemingly without consequence or justification, dominates the proceedings. The cast is tremendous top to bottom, but especially Benicio Del Toro. I'm not sure that there's another actor working today who could have pulled off the mix of mystery, physicality, competence and brutal sadness that he brings to the table as the mysterious foreign Alejandro. Brolin likewise wholly owns his character, bringing a unique disinterested charm to his portrayal of mysterious government operative Matt. The plot is sharp and moves at a brisk, brutal pace. As the task force seeks to smash or marginally disrupt a major cartel, Kate finds herself in much, much deeper than she anticipated, and finds that the morality of the modern drug war raises serious questions about what it is she's doing.
The Bad: As good as Emily Blunt is and can be, I found her character to be distractingly naive. Given all that she's seen and been involved in, her qualms, while absolutely shared by the audience, don't always ring true. Additionally, while shadowy people do shadowy things, sometimes the POINT of the whole endeavor is muddled. Not, necessarily, that everything must have a "POINT", but that the makers of Sicario clearly want there to be one, and sometimes that gets lost in the translation from page to screen.
In all, if you find yourself interested in a realistic-feeling, brutal, well-crafted film on the violence wrought by the drug war, you could do much, much worse than giving Sicario a watch. The film is perfectly directed, features great actors doing good work, and looks absolutely gorgeous. It's not always fun to watch, but it's worth it in the end, and your fingernails will be nubs by the final scene.
8/10.
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