Sicario opens with a raid on a house in Arizona. FBI agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) kicks down doors for the agency as part of its anti-kidnapping group. This raid, however, yields something quite different. They discover dead bodies hidden in the walls, the apparent victims of cartel violence. Kate is soon invited to join a special interagency task force assigned to deal with the cartel problem. As soon as she gets in the thick of it, she realizes that she's in over her head. This is unlike any operation she's ever been part of, and she isn't really prepared for the lengths that this task force will go to in order to achieve their goals.
Kate is the main character of the movie, but she is not the protagonist. Classically, a protagonist is the character that moves the action forward. Kate is not that character. She is at best an observer, an unwilling participant in the chaos that ensues. There are men around her who know much more, but it’s hard to say that they’re the prime movers of the action, either. If there is a protagonist to this film, it is the violence that has become prevalent on the border. It is the violence that makes all the decisions in this story, the corpses both the cause and the consequence of everything in this story.
This isn't a story of what can be done about the cartel problem. It isn't a story of heroes working to take down a truly evil force in the world today. It isn’t even the story of one woman’s struggle to do the right thing. Because in the realm in which this film operates, civilization has fallen to a point where the right thing just isn’t very clear anymore. This is a new frontier, and people are dying left and right while the authorities try to follow the rules of the game. It appears that in order to make any progress, compromises have to be made.
But the film makes clear that the progress is dubious at best. One could easily argue that the brutality involved in the pursuit of the cartels might be a step in the wrong direction. Or it might be the only way to deal with such a violent threat. Whatever the case, the film seems designed to show how intractable this problem is. The film will often get as far from the action as possible, rendering these major, violent conflicts as little blips on a screen. There is so much wilderness around these characters, a vastness of evil that threatens to consume at every turn. These characters are kept small, their efforts ultimately just a drop in a bucket.
This grim view of the world is helped along with expert lensing from director Denis Villeneuve and cinematographer Roger Deakins. At this point, Deakins just doesn’t miss. Here, he manages to make grainy night vision and thermal footage look good on screen. It’s amazing stuff. And Emily Blunt has always been a solid performer. As Kate, Blunt takes the audience to a real journey through very muddy moral waters. She gets great support from the likes of Josh Brolin and Benicio del Toro. Del Toro is incredible in this film, conveying a sense of sadness and danger in almost every frame that he’s in.
'Sicario' is a masterful work. It is certainly the best film from Villeneuve, who is no slouch by any means. This is a film that just keeps closing in, the characters more and more desperate as they witness things that in any reasonable society would never be allowed. But the border isn’t a reasonable society, with the men on top of either side preferring to let the violence lead. 'Sicario' is a frustrated scream into the uncaring night. There is nothing else it can really do.
My Rating:
