"Male" Film from a Female Point of View.....Sort Of

Rating: 7/10 (29 January 2016)

In a year in which the movie industry is being raked over the coals for not being diverse enough, "Sicario" had the opportunity to give us a woman's perspective on a genre generally reserved for macho men. And it makes good on that opportunity for a while, but in the end, the film's decision to drop its female protagonist and let events play out in a very traditional and male way makes it one of the bigger disappointments of my movie year.
Emily Blunt plays an FBI agent who's recruited to join an inter-department task force whose objective is to take out a Mexican drug lord. Her role on the team is left intentionally vague, both to her and to us, for most of the movie; not until the film's last third do we learn that she's there so that the CIA can basically dot its "i"s and cross its "t"s in establishing clearance for doing whatever it needs to do, much of it illegal, to control the situation.
Stories about idealistic folk who wake up to the questionable motives and methods of whatever cause they've aligned themselves with are a dime a dozen -- just earlier this year the movie "'71" covered the same thematic ground but set it against the backdrop of the IRA conflict in Ireland. But for its first half or so, "Sicario" feels like a fresh approach to the subject, mostly because it's told from a female point of view. Emily Blunt is a very good actress, and though she's not given perhaps as full a character as she could have been, she's given enough to work with and she does well with it. But toward the end, the film decides it's no longer interested in her, and it instead follows Benicio Del Toro's CIA double agent while he carries out criminal acts in the name of U.S. justice, and that's where the movie lost me a bit. It wouldn't have bothered me so much had not the movie leading up to that been told exclusively from Blunt's point of view. We don't see any events that she herself isn't present to witness. The change in perspective is jarring and disappointing.
"Sicario" is far from a total loss. It's quite a well made film and though it didn't live up to the potential it established for itself, I still enjoyed it. But how much more I might have enjoyed it had it lived up to its promise.
Grade: A-