Sicario, Sickario, Psychario

Rating: 5/10 (4 October 2015)

I was really stoked about Sicario and went to see it the night it opened. Why was I excited? Well, the posters looked cool and I knew that celebrated director Dennis Villeneuve was expected to deliver a fresh and intelligent suspense movie with a nice dose of action.
That, plus Benicio del Toro and Josh Brolin are in it, and I think they're cool.
What I got was a gritty action movie, but unfortunately it wasn't intelligent or thought-provoking. When I'm watching Expendables 3, I'm ready to sit back, enjoy the ride and hold back on the nit-picking. That's not really an option, though, when you have to pay attention to follow the story, and are promised new insights into a deep-rooted problem.
*** Spoilers ahead *** I thought it was clever that we see the plot from the perspective of an ingénue, this time in the form of a "small-time" FBI agent (Kate Mercer played by Emily Blunt). After her SWAT team storms a horror house run by the Mexican cartels in which two of her fellow officers are killed, she's ready to go after the big guys. Her new CIA-lead team is willing to use "unconventional" (read: highly questionable) methods. They extract a drug lord from a Mexican prison and torture him for information. Kate is told that she is there to "watch and learn", but ultimately she finds out that she is only there as a goon to legitimize the CIA operating in the homeland. Her function is not to "watch and learn" but to shut up, keep out and to sign a paper at the end. For the time being though, the team storms a tunnel used to smuggle drugs across the border in a scene that seems to take a page straight out of Zero Dark Twenty ...
*** Spoilers thick on the ground from here on *** Sicario really annoyed me because it brings together so much promise with an incredibly lackluster plot. I feel like I could write an entire book about it. What's the point of the horror house at the beginning? If the cartel is using it to dispose bodies, why would they shrink-wrap the corpses? Why are there gun-toting criminals in a house full of incriminating evidence? Why are the corpses behind dry walls (is the cartel planning on renting out the house)? Why is the trap-door booby-trapped? Why do police have to anticipate that in about six months every further crime scene will be booby-trapped if they don't stop the cartel now? When they are illegally extracting the cartel boss from the Mexican prison, why are they doing it in a highly visible convoy? If they anticipate being ambushed just before the frontier, why don't they keep a lane open? Why didn't they use a helicopter? Why don't they just torture the guy in Mexico? What are the ambushers trying to achieve? What is the role of the crooked cop? Could he be any hammier than carrying a gel bend around that the cartel uses to hold their bankrolls together? And on and on.
Five points because of the acting and the cinematography. For an intelligent thriller on the Mexican drugs war, I'd recommend Traffic over Sicario any time.