I get really excited every time some of my favorite artists team up to do a film, and Sicario is no exception! Visionary director Denis Villeneuve (Prisoners, Enemy), legendary cinematographer Roger Deakins (Prisoners, Doubt, Fargo, The Shawshank Redemption), and recent composer Johann Johannsson (Prisoners, The Theory of Everything, Foxcatcher) rock this daring and haunting crime thriller in ways I only dreamed they might. It was a total moviegasm experience for me, and my hands are still shaking from it.
Imagine what would happen if Zero Dark Thirty (2012) and Traffic (2000) had a baby, and you can grasp the direction this film takes. It's a brutal peek into the drug trade and cartel culture, and it relentlessly forces us to face the horrors we so easily permit. It's about the little compromises we make every day that push us farther and farther away from civilized life and into the deserts of chaos and cruelty. It's a web of policy and procedure, a critique of corrupt or misguided law enforcement, and a tragedy of one soldier's fall from innocence.
That soldier, played with great vulnerability and compassion by Emily Blunt (The Young Victoria, Into the Woods), is an FBI agent determined to win the war on drugs by the book. But, as she soon learns, her idealism is far from practical and far from successful. After a traumatic incident in one raid, which starts the film, she joins with Department of Defense agents to hunt down the head of a cartel and bring him to justice. She sees her team lie, torture, and murder their way to the top of the cartel, and becomes privy to secrets that destroy her faith.
Of course, director Villeneuve is keenly aware of his female protagonist as the heart and soul of the film, and so he keeps us trained on her. For every horror she faces, we see it only as it relates to her. In fact, most of the violence and dead bodies we see only briefly, before turning to see her reactions to them. It's a gamble, and one that pays off brilliantly. And that's not to say we don't see plenty of the other actors as well. Josh Brolin (No Country for Old Men, W.) is his typical gruff self, though here I found him more compelling and inscrutable than usual. And Benecio Del Toro (Traffic, Che) blew me away yet again as the dangerous loose cannon of the team, guarded behind his facade but vicious and terrifying when necessary.
Cinematographer Roger Deakins -- I can't even say how much I love his work -- fashions the drama with an eye for gravity and weight, shown most obviously in his repeated longshots of the desert landscape and views down from aircraft. He takes his time with every scene, painting a portrait with varied lights and colors that build to a climax that parallels the plot. By the time we actually reach the climactic raid -- underground and at night -- he throws convention to the wolves and douses us in thermal vision and night vision lenses. The interplay is provocative to say the least, aand by the time it was done I felt as though I had tried some of the drugs the characters were hunting.
The whole movie is a trip and a half, a spiritual descent into hell, and one that left me bewildered but satisfied. And the score by Johann Johannsson isn't intrusive at all; the only memorable part is an increasingly hypnotic drone that thrums on through the film, a mysterious and unsettling sound that feels tied to an idea of impending doom. If this all sounds a bit heady, it's because it is. And designed to be so. Handled by others, this film might have become mired in complex dialogue absorbed with the details of the crimes and organizations involved, in muddled editing and ambiguous plotlines juxtaposed with vague or unnecessary characters, or in sentiment and politics. Instead, we get a clear, if artistic, picture of a very specific world in which very real people grapple with huge abstract concepts. And it's all done beautifully, which is obviously the most important part.
IMDb: Sicario
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