Sicario review

There’s been a long tradition of southwest, boarder-town noirs that reach as far back as Anthony Mann’s 1949 film “Boarder Incident” and as recent as the Coen brother’s “No Country For Old Men,” as well as television’s “Breaking Bad.” Surprisingly, as worn as this genre may be, Denis Villeneuve’s “Sicario” still manages to find new life underneath old tropes and effectively tightens the screws with tense, Hitchcockian set-ups.

Emily Blunt plays Kate Macer, a moral FBI agent who’s hired by a government special operations unit to take down a powerful cartel leader who’s responsible for a number of indiscriminate killings and mutilations. In hopes of doing the right thing to get to the worst evils of society, she realizes that the deeper she gets involved the less her convictions and her morals will help her with the job at hand.

From the opening sequence when we see Blunt and her fellow agents break into a remotely located drug-house, with gunmen behind every corner and dead-bodies shrink-wrapped behind the dry-wall, Villeneuve establishes a Dante-like hell that increasingly challenges our hero as she descends deeper into each circle of its depravity. Josh Brolin plays her duplicitous guide into this journey named Matt Graver, a man who smugly wears flip-flops to office meetings and hides his elusive motives behind a casual smile. Benicio Del Toro’s Alejandro is an even tougher nut to crack, as he seems to be able to brutally operate outside of the strict confines of the law with complete immunity. Blunt serves as the audience’s surrogate but also as the movie’s moral center and its heart. To her credit, given the mechanical function of her character, she manages to breath in sync with the camera and effectively embodies Villeneuve’s tone of paranoia.

As with the director’s last film “Prisoners,” this feature was shot by the much-celebrated cinematographer Roger Deakins, and like his past work—including “No Country for Old Men”—every shot is precisely considered and milks each frame for ominous drama. Deakins’ artful approach to photography, along with the film’s doom-laden score by Jóhann Jóhannsson perfectly accents the movie’s many apocalyptic establishing shots and creates a malevolent sense of dread within the world these characters inhabit.

Luckily “Sicario” understands that aesthetics alone doesn’t make a movie without an assured story to tell and a confident director at the helm. Taylor Sheridan’s hard-boiled screenplay examines the war on drugs as a complicated parable with a “Chinatown” sense of pessimism. Villeneuve perfectly captures this with his nightmarish vision of violence as the last form of communication between the law and lawless.


This certainly isn’t a happy film and if you’re not inclined to watch a crime story that stares deep into the abyss without any tangible hope to keep from falling directly into it, then this might not be your ideal Saturday night. I, however, can’t recommend this movie highly enough. The performances across the board are fantastic—perhaps the best I’ve seen from all the leads in years—and it’s great to see a mainstream movie that’s isn’t satisfied with simply fulfilling its genre conventions.  Instead “Sicario” digs its familiar premise deeper for existential conflict and a darker tonal ambiance. 

Grade: A

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Oct-2015