Movie Review: Sicario (2015)
Feb. 6th, 2023 02:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
canyonwalkerLast night I watched the movie Sicario. It was released in 2015 and has been on my to-see list since then. ...Not very high on my list, obviously, as it's taken me 7½ years to get to it. 😅 This is a non-spoiler review.
Going in to the movie I expected it to be a shoot-'em-up, cops-and-robbers action flick, drug cartel hit men vs. the DEA or FBI. That's the impression I got from seeing the trailer in theaters 7½ years ago, anyway. That's not what it's about. BTW, I recommend against watching the trailer if you haven't seen the movie yet. Various reviews caution that the trailer gives away all the action scenes. That's because Sicario is not fundamentally an action movie. Yes, there are guns-out action scenes. Violence comes hard and fast. But it comes in discrete pieces. The movie is more of a cloak-and-dagger thriller, where the main character is trying to figure out what's really going on in this murky plot she's been hooked into, and we (the audience) are trying to figure it out along with her. It's also a dark story that conveys grim morals.
Sicario stars Emily Blunt, Josh Brolin, and Benicio Del Toro. Blunt is the aforementioned main character, a young FBI agent who agrees to serve on an inter-agency project after her team discovers the bodies of several dozen victims murdered by a drug cartel. Brolin is the leader of the inter-agency team, and Del Toro is a mysterious operative with a personal stake in the outcome.
Sicario, the film tells us in an overlay at the beginning, is a word that comes from the Latin word sicarius. It was coined 2,000 years ago when insurgents in Judea fought Roman invaders. A sicarius was a hunter who murdered Roman officers. In Spanish sicario means assassin.
The film was directed by Denis Villeneuve with cinematographer Roger Deakins and audio director Jóhann Jóhannsson. I mentioned these three directors because they made the film so much more than just an action flick. Deakins's visuals are beautiful, combining visuals of the desert landscape with helicopter overheads and views through night-vision goggles and infrared cameras in ways that aren't gimmicky. Jóhannsson's orchestration helps set the mood of tension without drawing attention to itself.
The visual work of the movie, and its telling of a story with grim morals, reminded me of the 2000 movie Traffic. That was directed by Steven Soderburgh, though both movies have Benicio Del Toro as one of the leads. Del Toro's characters are not the same person, though it's possible to imagine one is like the other but 15 years later. That's because Del Toro carefully underplays both of them, portraying characters who are surprisingly capable yet believably underestimated by their opponents.
Del Toro's acting in Sicario is better because the character is in some ways more challenging. In Traffic his character was a police officer who wanted to stop chasing drug kingpins and get back to some semblance of normal, watching neighborhood kids play baseball. In Sicario his character burns with an understated intensity because he's resigned himself that there is no other way. Curiously one of the last scenes in the movie is a neighborhood kids' baseball game— I'm not sure to what degree that's an intentional homage— but instead of watching and enjoying the game, Del Toro admonishes one of the other leads, "You should move to a small town where the rule of law still exists. You will not survive here. You are not a wolf. And this is the land of wolves now."
Going in to the movie I expected it to be a shoot-'em-up, cops-and-robbers action flick, drug cartel hit men vs. the DEA or FBI. That's the impression I got from seeing the trailer in theaters 7½ years ago, anyway. That's not what it's about. BTW, I recommend against watching the trailer if you haven't seen the movie yet. Various reviews caution that the trailer gives away all the action scenes. That's because Sicario is not fundamentally an action movie. Yes, there are guns-out action scenes. Violence comes hard and fast. But it comes in discrete pieces. The movie is more of a cloak-and-dagger thriller, where the main character is trying to figure out what's really going on in this murky plot she's been hooked into, and we (the audience) are trying to figure it out along with her. It's also a dark story that conveys grim morals.
Sicario stars Emily Blunt, Josh Brolin, and Benicio Del Toro. Blunt is the aforementioned main character, a young FBI agent who agrees to serve on an inter-agency project after her team discovers the bodies of several dozen victims murdered by a drug cartel. Brolin is the leader of the inter-agency team, and Del Toro is a mysterious operative with a personal stake in the outcome.
Sicario, the film tells us in an overlay at the beginning, is a word that comes from the Latin word sicarius. It was coined 2,000 years ago when insurgents in Judea fought Roman invaders. A sicarius was a hunter who murdered Roman officers. In Spanish sicario means assassin.
The film was directed by Denis Villeneuve with cinematographer Roger Deakins and audio director Jóhann Jóhannsson. I mentioned these three directors because they made the film so much more than just an action flick. Deakins's visuals are beautiful, combining visuals of the desert landscape with helicopter overheads and views through night-vision goggles and infrared cameras in ways that aren't gimmicky. Jóhannsson's orchestration helps set the mood of tension without drawing attention to itself.
The visual work of the movie, and its telling of a story with grim morals, reminded me of the 2000 movie Traffic. That was directed by Steven Soderburgh, though both movies have Benicio Del Toro as one of the leads. Del Toro's characters are not the same person, though it's possible to imagine one is like the other but 15 years later. That's because Del Toro carefully underplays both of them, portraying characters who are surprisingly capable yet believably underestimated by their opponents.
Del Toro's acting in Sicario is better because the character is in some ways more challenging. In Traffic his character was a police officer who wanted to stop chasing drug kingpins and get back to some semblance of normal, watching neighborhood kids play baseball. In Sicario his character burns with an understated intensity because he's resigned himself that there is no other way. Curiously one of the last scenes in the movie is a neighborhood kids' baseball game— I'm not sure to what degree that's an intentional homage— but instead of watching and enjoying the game, Del Toro admonishes one of the other leads, "You should move to a small town where the rule of law still exists. You will not survive here. You are not a wolf. And this is the land of wolves now."
