Of all the movies I've seen in the past while, Sicario has stuck with me the most. It's meaty, dark, and forces yourself to ask serious moral questions. In this review I'll do my best to bring to light some themes the film explores while keeping the plot largely intact. This is another movie I saw without having anything spoiled, so I'll do my best to do the same for you.
"What are we doing?" and "What are we doing here?" are two questions often posed by Emily Blunt's character in this excellent, haunting, and thematically heavy film. Any movie about the Mexican cartel is going to be intense and unrelenting, but Sicario seems to accomplish it's purposes without glorification of either side of the war. In fact, I think that's why I enjoyed this movie so much, is that I appreciated seeing that the devil is at work on either side of the line, and what lengths are we willing to go to stop it? How far down the rabbit hole will we go morally doing the right thing, even if the results are horrific, scarring, and life-altering?
Before I go any further, I have to get this off my chest: Sicario is a well made movie. I was in awe of the construction of the movie from start to finish. Roger Deakins (one my personal heroes, idols, whatever), has done some of his very best cinematography work here and crafted some scenes and used light in ways that I'll never forget. A particular shot stands out in my mind of where he shoots the silhouettes of some soldiers descending into a tunnel while the sun is setting. While beautiful outside, by nature that beautiful light falls upon all who stand in it, however, also by nature, that beauty is no where to be found where there is no light.
Aside from the cinematography, the score is propulsive, subtle, and unsettling. From the very first scene, and without any words, you can feel the tension rising. There is true craft and skill going on behind the scenes, and it's effective. Same goes for the acting. This is hands down the best work I've seen Benicio del Toro do in quite some time. He's mysterious, empathetic, gentle, brutal, and merciless all in the same day. Well done. Emily Blunt (one of my favorites) is incredible here, but I will say that my only real complaint of the movie is that she wasn't even more fleshed out. I often felt she was a stand in for the audience, I would have liked her role to be a little more substantial than it was. Josh Brolin is also fantastic. Everyone appears to be very committed to the role, and I believed every single one of them.
As far as the story goes, we have Emily Blunt's character who specializes in abductions become recruited for a special mission to Juarez, Mexico in order to track down some leaders of the cartel. She isn't given a lot of details, but commits to the mission anyway. She quickly realizes that she's merely along for the ride and is ends up seeing and learning more than she had hoped when it comes to what it takes to get a job done "for the right reasons".
And that's the main crux of the film: "What are we doing here?". It's a tough question to answer. Is it our job to fight these battles? At what cost? Who makes the decisions? Why should we follow those orders? Who is doing this?
So much of life is grey, and that's where our choices can most strongly influence our character. What do we do when there is no clear answer? What are our motivations? Are we justified? Why do we do what we do?
For many, these are questions easily brushed aside, or tossed to someone else to handle. But for Blunt's character (which acts as a stand in for us) she forces us to ask ourselves some of these very questions. They can be hard to answer, and that's what Sicario wants to do for us. The movie is about the cartel, yes, but at it's core it's a tale of what is right and what is wrong, and what makes those things right and what makes those things wrong.
Sicario is not a light, casual viewing experience. At least it's not meant to be. It's lean, meaty, and full of tough, interesting questions. It's also pretty heavy content-wise. It's a realistic movie, and while nothing is glamorized, or even stylized, the filmmakers don't mess around depicting the reality of the problems that plague the American-Mexican border. These things really happen, and I feel the filmmakers made the movie they had to in order to get the effect they wanted for the audience - which is for us to ask ourselves tough questions.
With that being said, if you have the stomach for an intense film with deeply introspective themes, then go for it. It's a beautifully gut-wrenching and haunting film, that I'm certainly glad I saw.
Grade: A-
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