Send a Thief to Catch a Thief...

Rating: 8/10 (13 October 2015)

This movie was definitely poignant and recommended for all suspense lovers. Some will be shocked if they are not aware of how "Aztec sacrifice brutal" the Mexican drug war killings are. But Aztecs honored their brave war captives in death and there is no honor shown here to the victims much less blood for the Gods. So Jeffrey Donovan's US agent character remarks that the narcos are smart because they make people believe that the brutalized victims must have done something bad to deserve such gruesome deaths.
You have a lot of high tension and uncertainty caused by the need for extreme secrecy required for the success of the protagonists' hidden agenda. Emily Blunt and her U.S.border agent partner don't seem to grasp this basic military premise that you may get killed by the enemy at anytime on a mission but that doesn't give you the right to know what's going on. While her acting is superb, her character's inability to "go with the flow" seems naive and out of touch with basic operating truths. But maybe she is intended to be the voice of reason in the Land of Wolves.
The terrific irony is that the one person who doesn't outright lie to her (beside her partner who almost gets her killed by mistake) is Benicio Del Toro's "consultant" character. He admits from the start that he is employed by people in Colombia when she asks him. He saves her life though he later threatens possibly falsely to retract it. He is the great white hope in this operation who surely has his own agenda but who seems to respect his opponents and make their required elimination in this live chess game as painless and quick as possible.
And the guiltiest truth we have to admit is that Del Toro, the consultant-sicario is the hero of this tale, not the legal-minded idealistic border agent who has all the usual markings of nobility. The only addition I wanted to see was more camera time on the narco-traficos side (other than the crooked but amiable Mexican state cop who plays soccer with his son) but that might detract from the Us versus Them atmosphere crucial to the film.