Superior film-making with hidden layers that transcends the boundaries

Rating: 9/10 (15 October 2015)

STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning
After a disastrous drug bust on the US/Mexico border left some members of her team dead, Federal Agent Mercer (Kate Winslet, sorry, Emily Blunt) is left feeling disillusioned with the war against drugs, until she is approached by Agent Graver (Josh Brolin) who is setting up a Task Force to go after a big time drug dealer who may have ultimately been behind her teammate's deaths. Assisted by the mysterious Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro), she and her close partner Wayne (Daniel Kaluuga) are dragged into a morally skewed, uneven world, where the ends justify the means in the most brutal and unfair of ways, and no one escapes squeaky clean.
With an odd title that is explained away at the beginning as meaning 'hitman' in Mexico, Sicario presents itself as a typical action thriller centred in the drug world, albeit one with more emphasis on a hard hitting, no nonsense style of delivery, and in many ways achieves this objective. But Denis Villeneuve's film penetrates much further than this, serving as more of an eye opening, unbiased glimpse into this most murky of worlds. With echoes of Steven Soderbergh's Traffic, and the Italian crime drama Gomorrah, and even the recent Cartel Land, it emerges as a very pleasant surprise and far more than the sum of its parts.
It gets by, more than anything, on a silent, moody, lingering atmosphere throughout, that accompanies the unfolding story perfectly. Our unwitting, unsuspecting central protagonists are drawn into a world where terror and misery permeates everything, where there is deep seated unhappiness on every corner, and little hope of anything ever changing, if the excesses of wealthy America continue to channel the demand for exploitation on the other side of the border. There's no nice, neat and tidy happy Hollywood ending to wrap everything up with, just characters who've crossed lines they can't cross back from and seen the ends have justified the means in the most horrific and unthinkable of ways.
We're left with a subtle reminder that there's only the promise of more of the same to come, and the cycle of hopelessness is doomed to continue. Sicario promises one thing on the surface, and ends up delivering something far more dynamic and compelling, the latest gritty, no holds barred assault on the doomed war on drugs. ****