(in Spanish) Time to meet God.

Rating: 6/10 (30 December 2016)

By now, Denis Villeneuve can no longer be considered the promising young director even as he continually makes waves in Hollywood. Portions of Sicario resemble a sleek, well-designed action thriller, and that begins with his technical direction. The sound mixing is exquisite, combining the thudding, ominous score of Jóhann Jóhannsson with every booming gunshot that means another life taken. The cinematography by Roger Deakins captures a Mexico in decay, with a beige-seeped and yellowed palette contrasting the cooler blues of the American nightlife. See the difference between the climatic dinner execution, bathed in a warm domestic glow about to be sullied with blood, and the final confrontation in the cold sterility of Kate's apartment - this is no breeding ground for empathy or justice.
From this point Sicario makes a big show of emphasising how its characters are bound or unbound by their domestic situation. Kate is divorced with no kids, as her interrogation tells us, and that frees her up to make the harder decisions and be the whistle-blower to a corrupt system. Likewise Alejandro has lost his family, and that simultaneously drives him to be the lone renegade and allows him to cross legal and moral boundaries that a shackled family man might not be so inclined to. And I'm willing to bet a king's ransom that Matt also has no such immediate family to hold him back from casually rolling with all these murky dealings - he's even perfected the art of forgoing corporate pretense by the look of his flip flops. On the other side of the fence there are clumsy attempts to appeal to our sentimentality through brief and infrequent peeks into one specific Mexican father and his soccer-loving son. But the film is so preoccupied with how the American invaders feel it scarcely pauses to consider their perspective: "This is how the world works," say the men with guns, and don't you dare try to challenge it with your own experiences. It's a rather shallow attempt at humanising them, and because we don't discover its relevance to the story until late on in the film, it seems to exist in an entirely separate reality from the drug-riddled Mexico that the soldiers tackle.
Emily Blunt, to her credit, never ever makes the suggestion that it is her femininity that allows her to make these observations, and the film doesn't suggest feminine weakness as a contributing factor to her powerlessness. She's not a token female, and she's tough enough to ask the hard questions where it matters. Yet the character irregardless of gender is a little hollow, poised to be willfully naive and painfully out of her depth - an early experience establishes her credentials and experience before waving them away to enable her to be our moral proxy. I lost count of how many times she stages confrontations that are thinly doubled to act as the audience's perceived moral outrage. Kate wants to arrest Díaz for money laundering, and Villeneuve just giggles and pats her on the head condescendingly. In reality this is not such a bad idea, since many high profile criminals have been nailed for much smaller crimes than their larger implied offences, but in the movie world it's an insult to the well-oiled machine of corruption that swallows pure-hearted idealists like her and spits out moral ambiguity.
It's problematic to begin dismantling her when there's little to dismantle. Kate's moral convictions are barely drawn and sparsely constructed of simple catchphrases like "I have to know." Though she may be interested in preserving legal justice and cleaning up the streets for the more fair, soccer-loving Mexican folk, the film doesn't attempt to link the two. That comes from Alejandro, Benicio del Toro as a video-game character come to life. He's not a person but a lean, mean assassination machine, lurking in the shadows and striking at opportunistic moments. With his guns and silencer he is an almost comical force of nature, and although the aim is not to glorify this type of vengeance (but regretfully admit its usefulness), he does so anyway. He's much too cool, much too efficient, and growls buzzwords that indicate the necessity of his job: "This is a land of wolves now."
Additionally, for all the film's moralising on violence it sometimes utilises it as a punchline - see how the nightmarish POV in the tunnel slowly uncovers ghostly footsteps, and then bloody bodies slumped up against the walls. There is little logic in a seasoned FBI agent gawking at the ground in a hostile raid - the shot is exploitative of the same type of graphic and transgressive content that her character argues so vehemently against. Sicario is so hard pressed and insistent on moving away from Hollywood-wrapped comfort and into the harshness of 'reality' that it revels in its ugliness and cynicism. Matt and Alejandro are correct in many ways, and the public would be content in reaping the rewards of their work whilst not looking too closely at the finer print. But to deliver it via such obvious, obnoxious caricatures feels much too simplistic, ironic for a film that champions the thought process of 'the ends justify the means'. It's the complete opposite of ambiguity; it keeps stacking the chips of the opposing sides higher and higher, trying to outdo each other with senseless violence, bravado and brutality. And then it feebly tosses Kate in the middle of this mess, hurls her around for a bit, then shrugs and says 'Eh, we tried'. It's the cinematic equivalent of pointing a gun to the audience's head and asking: 'You're either with us or against us', and then condemning you for choosing the lesser of two evils anyway.