Skip to main content

Nothing will make sense to your American ears, and you will doubt everything that we do, but in the end, you will understand.

Sicario
(2015)

(SPOILERS) Maybe Denis Villeneuve ought to call on his first language being French as an excuse for the script quality of his forays into Hollywood. First there was the overheated, ridiculous revenge picture Prisoners, masquerading as a serious exploration of the repercussions of child abduction, and now he’s taken a repeat course, plunging into the world of shadowy CIA operations and Mexican drug cartels, only to pull back and reveal that the movie didn’t really have important matters on its mind at all. It was just about a cool guy taking out the baddies. The acclaim both have received is slightly mystifying, although in Sicario’s case I’m at least partly along for the ride. This is a superbly directed movie, with several strong performances, and it’s only in the last third that the procedural aspect is revealed as little more than a sop, disguising its decidedly pulpy intent.


I’d read comparisons to Traffic, so I was lulled into thinking Sicario’s early stages were a positive sign, its unwilling to nursemaid its audience and over-explain its content; we share the confusion of the main protagonist. By the end, I was wondering if this might be a case of obfuscation due to embarrassment over how little of the plot really makes sense.


The only real point of reference to Traffic – apart from the drugs trade, obviously – seems to be the entirely superfluous plotline in which Mexican cop Silvio (Maximiliano Hernández) is awoken by his son each morning and asked to come out and play football. Yes, I suppose it’s intended to illustrate how drug trafficking ruins lives and destroys families, but the actual integration is entirely artificial, inserted into a plot that, unlike Traffic, is entirely focussed on those out to bring down the cartel boss. As such, it feels flagrantly cynical, an attempt to persuade that it has the broader (awards-worthy?) substance of Soderbergh’s film.


Sicario is actor Taylor Sheridan’s first screenplay and, to give him credit, he appears to have a good sense of rhythm and structure, offering surprises and twists throughout. The problem is, those faculties aren’t necessarily in service of an internally coherent piece in the final analysis. Emily Blunt’s FBI SWAT team agent Kate Mace is offered an observational role in a unit consisting of Department of Defence flip-flops-wearing Matt Graver (Josh Brolin, revelling in the chance to play a completely self-regarding arsehole) and a Delta Force unit, after discovering an Arizona house filled with walled-up corpses. Having lost several colleagues, she’s keen to bring the perpetrator to justice so agrees to work with them.


Inevitably, the innocent has her eyes opened, and she discovers that the tactics and methods of Graver (actually a CIA officer) and his partner, the mysterious Alejandro Gillick (Benicio del Toro), leave a lot to be desired, most of them being highly illegal. They make an incursion into Mexico, extracting one of cartel boss Manual Díaz’s (Bernardo P Saracino) lieutenants, during the course of which a sterling freeway shootout takes place. As her association with the team continues, she is continually undermined in her attempts to pursue legitimate means of bringing Diaz to justice, including prosecuting him for money laundering and being subjected to an attack by a dirty cop Ted (Jon Bernthal), during which Alejandro intervenes only at the last moment.


The team’s main goal is to set up a situation whereby Díaz reports back to “ghost” drug lord Fausto Alarcón (Julio Cedillo) so they can take him out, and this is where the picture begins to go awry for me. Ostensibly, it appears that the raid on the border tunnel used for drug smuggling is a distraction enabling Alejandro to get across and follow Díaz to his boss (presumably it also provides the CIA with alibi of conducting a legitimate operation), but if so it’s an astonishingly thin plan. 


The CIA is going to rely on just one man to go in and assassinate the drug lord? A man for whom circumstances blissfully collide, such that he hitches a ride with the corrupt cop known to Díaz? Added to which, the CIA appears to be following Díaz anyway, via the new Hollywood all-purpose plot device, a drone, since Alejandro is getting constant feedback on Alarcon’s estate and defences. So did they need Alejandro to make like a one-man army at all? I’m sure Sheridan has explanations for these points, but I doubt it will really make them any easier to swallow.


Essentially, this is where the picture drifts from suspension of disbelief into outright contrivance. It wouldn’t have looked so out of place for del Toro to have been straight swapped with Steven Seagal at the point where Alejandro rocks up and shoots all the bad guys. Except for killing the wife and kids, of course, as Seagal would never go that far; I guess we’re supposed to think this gives Alejandro a veneer of the grounding and believability (much the same as de rigueur scenes of waterboarding and cynicism with regards to the activities of ostensibly governmental institutions), but it does nothing of the sort.


The unlikeliness is compounded when we learn Alejandro’s background; he’s not CIA, he’s working for the rival Colombian Medellin Cartel, but even this is a means to an end. He’s out for revenge against Alarcón, who had his wife decapitated and his daughter dumped in an acid bath. Before all this, Alejandro was just a prosecutor in Juárez (now he is the Sicario – the hitman – of the title). Er, okay. So this is revealed as the tale of a lawyer who becomes a kick-ass ninja in order to wreak vengeance on those who finished his family. Suddenly Sicario’s gritty trappings fall around its ears with the revelation that Alejandro is Batman (I’ve seen it suggested that “prosecutor” is a reference to Alejandro’s method of killing, which is just plain silly, although I guess we’ll find out in the sequel, focussing on this vigilante for justice).


Having thoroughly undermined the character and the bedrock of the picture, there are still some decent scenes and moments to be had. Alejandro holding a gun under Kate’s chin, forcing her to sign the report legitimising the CIA operation (the only reasons she was invited along) has a certain potency. And there’s little need to convince the audience that the CIA would be willing to engage in re-introducing a status quo, fostering the continuing drugs trade through a reliable source (the Colombians) rather than one that is out of control; one might argue this is a much too charitable depiction of their essential corruptibility, and that they are really up to their armpits in coke, complicit with its cultivation and supply at every turn in the aid of black budgets (the recently explored subject matter of Kill the Messenger).


Which hastens a further question; if the CIA is so willing to circumvent and ignore every rule in the book to achieve their ends, why would they solicit the company of a straight-shooter like Kate (in the initial conversation, they reject her partner Reggie, The Fades' Daniel Kaluuya, for similar reasons). Do they really want to be encountering such problems every time they organise an illicit operation? They’d spend all their time threatening reluctant collaborators. Wouldn’t it be common-sense to either forge the whole thing/keep it off the official record or get someone in who is reliable and malleable, a tried and trusted FBI yes-person? Sure, the Sicario route makes for a dramatic charge, but it undermines the picture’s gritty posturing.


There are other points where the contrivance should have been a warning sign of the gaps in logic to come; Reggie’s best pal, whom Reggie is secretly setting Kate up on a date with, just happens to be a dirty cop out to get the skinny on what she knows on behalf of the cartel? No wonder the scene has caused confusion. It’s not a case of a densely layered picture requiring a repeat visit to glean all its riches; Sicario’s a muddle.


And yet, despite this, there’s much to like in the picture. Blunt may look a little willowy and un-SWAT like, but that works in the favour of the antagonistic, testosterone-charged milieu into which she is thrust. I rather liked that, for a change, the protagonist (well, until you find the makers are more interested in Alejandro) is out of her depth, and doesn’t get to indulge gun-totting justice at every opportunity, even if it beggars belief that someone in her line of work wouldn’t have eyes wide open to the ways and means of other agencies, even if she has no truck with dodgy dealings herself.


Villeneuve’s direction is outstanding. I completely see why he’s been engaged for Blade Runner 2; he and Roger Deakins will certainly ensure it looks fantastic. More worrying, though, is his aforementioned cluelessness with regards to scripts. If his English language track record is any indication, Rick Deckard’s return could be something of a train wreck (which, to be fair, I think most people are expecting anyway).


First rate set pieces litter the picture, including the raid on the house (although, even I know – from watching movies – that Kate is rubbish at clearing rooms) the gun battle on the freeway, Kate’s altercation with Ted, the night vision tunnel incursion, and – despite intruding from a completely different movie, or at least different to the one I thought this was – Alejandro’s assault on Alarcón’s residence. Roger Deakins’ cinematography is every bit as impressive as you’d expect, while Johann Johannsson’s rumbly, oppressive score adds enormously to the mood (I wouldn’t be surprised if he has another Oscar nomination coming his way, although this is hardly the sort of thing you’d sit down and savour with a glass of wine and a good book).


Sicario isn’t nearly as stark, rigorous and uncompromising as you might have been led to expect, so it’s just like Prisoners in that respect. The action is as enervating and slick as in your typical action movie, while its characters and situations are as melodramatic they come. Nevertheless, Villeneuve fully succeeds in lending the picture a pervasively oppressive atmosphere (as he did with Enemy), underpinned by a barren, foreboding landscape. If you approach Sicario as an engaging thriller with about as much insight into the world of cartels as Point Break has into bank robberies, you probably won’t come away too disappointed.




Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Lieutenant, you run this station like chicken night in Turkey.

Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) (SPOILERS) You can’t read a review of Assault on Precinct 13 with stumbling over references to its indebtedness – mostly to Howard Hawks – and that was a preface for me when I first caught it on Season Three of BBC2’s Moviedrome (I later picked up the 4Front VHS). In Precinct 13 ’s case, it can feel almost like an attempt to undercut it, to suggest it isn’t quite that original, actually, because: look. On the other hand, John Carpenter was entirely upfront about his influences (not least Hawks), and that he originally envisaged it as an outright siege western (rather than an, you know, urban one). There are times when influences can truly bog a movie down, if it doesn’t have enough going for it in its own right. That’s never the case with Assault on Precinct 13 . Halloween may have sparked Carpenter’s fame and maximised his opportunities, but it’s this picture that really evidences his style, his potential and his masterful facility with music.
Post a Comment
Read more

The wolves are running. Perhaps you would do something to stop their bite?

The Box of Delights (1984) If you were at a formative age when it was first broadcast, a festive viewing of The Box of Delights  may well have become an annual ritual. The BBC adaptation of John Masefield’s 1935 novel is perhaps the ultimate cosy yuletide treat. On a TV screen, at any rate. To an extent, this is exactly the kind of unashamedly middle class-orientated bread-and-butter period production the corporation now thinks twice about; ever so posh kids having jolly adventures in a nostalgic netherworld of Interwar Britannia. Fortunately, there’s more to it than that. There is something genuinely evocative about Box ’s mythic landscape, a place where dream and reality and time and place are unfixed and where Christmas is guaranteed a blanket of thick snow. Key to this is the atmosphere instilled by director Renny Rye. Most BBC fantasy fare doe not age well but The Box of Delights is blessed with a sinister-yet-familiar charm, such that even the creakier production decisi
Post a Comment
Read more

White nights getting to you?

Insomnia (2002) (SPOILERS) I’ve never been mad keen on Insomnia . It’s well made, well-acted, the screenplay is solid and it fits in neatly with Christopher Nolan’s abiding thematic interests, but it’s… There’s something entirely adequateabout it. It isn’t pushing any kind of envelope. It’s happy to be the genre-bound crime study it is and nothing more, something emphasised by Pacino’s umpteenth turn as an under-pressure cop.
Post a Comment
Read more

We got two honkies out there dressed like Hassidic diamond merchants.

The Blues Brothers (1980) (SPOILERS) I had limited awareness of John Belushi’s immense mythos before  The Blues Brothers arrived on retail video in the UK (so 1991?) My familiarity with SNL performers really began with Ghostbusters ’ release, which meant picking up the trail of Jake and Elwood was very much a retrospective deal. I knew Animal House , knew Belushi’s impact there, knew 1941 (the Jaws parody was the best bit), knew Wired was a biopic better avoided. But the minor renaissance he, and they, underwent in the UK in the early ’90s seemed to have been initiated by Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers, of all things; Everybody Needs Somebody was part of their That Sounds Good to Me medley, the first of their hits not to make No.1, and Everybody ’s subsequent single release then just missed the Top Ten. Perhaps it was this that hastened CIC/Universal to putting the comedy out on video. Had the movie done the rounds on UK TV in the 80s? If so, it managed to pass me by. Even bef
Post a Comment
Read more

How do you melt somebody’s lug wrench?

Starman (1984) (SPOILERS) John Carpenter’s unlikely SF romance. Unlikely, because the director has done nothing before or since suggesting an affinity for the romantic fairy tale, and yet he proves surprisingly attuned to Starman ’s general vibes. As do his stars and Jack Nitzsche, furnishing the score in a rare non-showing from the director-composer. Indeed, if there’s a bum note here, it’s the fairly ho-hum screenplay; the lustre of Starman isn’t exactly that of making a silk purse from a sow’s ear, but it’s very nearly stitching together something special from resolutely average source material.
Post a Comment
Read more

He must have eaten a whole rhino horn!

Fierce Creatures (1997) (SPOILERS) “ I wouldn’t have married Alyce Faye Eicheberger and I wouldn’t have made Fierce Creatures.” So said John Cleese , when industrial-sized, now-ex gourmand Michael Winner, of Winner’s Dinners , Death Wish II and You Must Be Joking! fame (one of those is a legitimate treasure, but only one) asked him what he would do differently if he could live his life again. One of the regrets identified in the response being Cleese’s one-time wife (one-time of two other one-time wives, with the present one mercifully, for John’s sake, ongoing) and the other being the much-anticipated Death Fish II , the sequel to monster hit A Fish Called Wanda. Wanda was a movie that proved all Cleese’s meticulous, focus-group-tested honing and analysis of comedy was justified. Fierce Creatures proved the reverse.
Post a Comment
Read more

I dreamed about a guy in a dirty red and green sweater.

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) (SPOILERS) I first saw A Nightmare on Elm Street a little under a decade after its release, and I was distinctly underwhelmed five or so sequels and all the hype. Not that it didn’t have its moments, but there was an “It’ll do” quality that reflects most of the Wes Craven movies I’ve seen. Aside from the postmodern tease of A New Nightmare – like Last Action Hero , unfairly maligned – I’d never bothered with the rest of the series, in part because I’m just not that big a horror buff, but also because the rule that the first is usually the best in any series, irrespective of genre, tends to hold out more often than not. So now I’m finally getting round to them, and it seemed only fair to start by giving Freddy’s first another shot. My initial reaction holds true.
Post a Comment
Read more

Maybe he had one too many peanut butter and fried banana sandwiches.

3000 Miles to Graceland (2001) (SPOILERS) The kind of movie that makes your average Tarantino knockoff look classy, 3000 Miles to Graceland is both aggressively unpleasant and acutely absent any virtues, either as a script or a stylistic exercise. The most baffling thing about it is how it attracted Kevin Costner and Kurt Russell, particularly since both ought to have been extra choosy at this point, having toplined expensive bombs in the previous half decade that made them significantly less bankable names. And if you’re wondering how this managed to cost the $62m reported on Wiki, it didn’t; Franchise Pictures, one of the backers, was in the business of fraudulently inflating budgets .
Post a Comment
Read more

Ours is the richest banking house in Europe, and we’re still being kicked.

The House of Rothschild (1934) (SPOILERS) Fox’s Rothschild family propaganda pic does a pretty good job presenting the clan as poor, maligned, oppressed Jews who fought back in the only way available to them: making money, lots of lovely money! Indeed, it occurred to me watching The House of Rothschild , that for all its inclusion of a rotter of a Nazi stand-in (played by Boris Karloff), Hitler must have just loved the movie, as it’s essentially paying the family the compliment of being very very good at doing their very best to make money from everyone left, right and centre. It’s thus unsurprising to learn that a scene was used in the anti-Semitic (you might guess as much from the title) The Eternal Jew .
Post a Comment
Read more

No, I ain’t a good man. I ain’t the worst either.

A Perfect World (1993) (SPOILERS) It’s easy to assume, retrospectively, that Clint’s career renaissance continued uninterrupted from Unforgiven to, pretty much, now, with his workhorse output ensuring he was never more than a movie away from another success. The nineties weren’t such a sure thing, though. Follow-up In the Line of Fire , a (by then) very rare actor-for-hire gig, made him seem like a new-found sexagenarian box office draw, having last mustered a dependably keen audience response as far back as 1986 and Heartbreak Ridge . But at home, at least, only The Bridges of Madison County – which he took over as director at a late stage, having already agreed to star – and the not-inexpensive Space Cowboys really scored before his real feted streak began with Mystic River. However, there was another movie in there that did strong business. Just not in the US: A Perfect World .
Post a Comment
Read more