Sicario Review

Sicario+Review

Ryan Sneddon

 

Whelp, leave it to me to start a film review column at the start of Oscar season. Simply fantastic planning on my part. Well, for better or worse, I’m gonna have to start things somewhere, so I’m starting with Sicario. Sicario is a film about the Mexican drug war. It is an exploration of morality and legality, about how far people can go in pursuit of something right and at what point that pursuit no longer becomes justifiable, or even if a seemingly righteous goal can be considered correct.  

 

The film has three stars; Emily Blunt (Edge of Tomorrow, Devil wears Prada) as Kate, Josh Brolin (No Country for Old Men, 2010 True Grit, Men In Black 3) as Matt, and Benicio Del Toro (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Sin City, and that collector guy from the Marvel movies) as Alejandro.  

 

Kate is an American SWAT officer dealing with the effects of the Mexican cartel’s drug trade on our side of the border. Wanting to make a difference, she volunteers for a special group, headed by Matt, that is about to journey into Mexico with a secretive plan to take down the leading Cartel. Once she becomes a part of the Operation, she meets Alejandro, Matt’s partner, Mexican native and an expert on the cartels. From there, she witnesses the group carry out a variety of questionable actions in their quest to take down boss after boss in the ladder of organized crime, questioning the validity of the operation as a whole.

 

From a technical standpoint, the film largely excels. All three leads give solid performances in their own right. Blunt provides a powerful sense of her character’s strong sense of morality and care for procedure, Brolin is wonderfully charismatic when he’s not helping someone get their teeth kicked in, and Del Toro gives off a darkly intriguing sense of mystery.

 

The sound design does a great job of constantly keeping the audience on edge, even in events where little is physically happening, and in-sync with Blunt’s character during scenes focusing on her. For instance, at one point toward the end of the film, she is walking through a firefight that her unit is undertaking with multiple cartel members. This would be an easy chance to use typical action music and play the scene for excitement. However, Kate herself is not exchanging fire.  As such, the film employs the same music it has been using up until that point, opting instead for a suspenseful approach.  

 

The cinematography also succeeds here. One of my favorite repeating shots used in the film is a mildly disorienting mid-air, 90 degree downward angle moving along the landscape. Be it barren desert hills or densely populated city buildings, which always does a superb job in making you feel like the outsider alongside the protagonist, always does justice in further mystifying both her location and situation.
As far as on-screen violence goes, there isn’t much. Several people are shot in-frame, and the opening scene can be rather disturbing to some, but overall I’m not sure if I’d call this a particularly violent film; gore is not a word that I would associate here. As an overall entertaining moral crime thriller with solid acting and technical finesse, I would give Sicario an 8.