dark, smart, understated, tremendous craft, sad and true

Rating: 9/10 (3 October 2015)

incredibly well observed and written and directed and acted. Weird violence at the beginning though, not sure why the "hostages" were killed and put in walls, that took a lot of work and was a super powerful image but I'm not sure what this was in service to. Why wouldn't you get rid of the bodies? Was it a warning? to who? Anyway, there was menace and creepiness throughout, at night, during the day, any particular scene would turn into something else. A pickup scene in a bar goes terribly wrong, worst date ever! An easy private jet flight has intimations of major trouble as Del Toro's character has a tremor and terrible dreams. Brolin's super casual and easy style/behavior/comportment is equally misleading and menacing. The two police officers are simply covers to allow a super expensive hit mission to proceed for god knows what ultimate purpose. This is a more realistic version of "no country for old men" (Brolin was great in that btw)) Hellishly violent as civilization's best angels are missing, as the "drug war" sponsored by US consumption and the huge police apparatus serving it, churns through the lives of so many. The little story of the Mexican state police officer was important and hardly ever seen in a movie with such scope. The ending was not Hollywood, there were no heroes, nothing good resulted, the putative heroine is left bereft and barely survives. Very well edited, things are not overstated, we aren't let by the nose.