SICARIO: DAY OF THE SOLDADO
The original Sicario, released in 2015, was a taught, dread-laden vision of the murky world of governmental agencies and their black-ops war with Mexican drug Cartel’s under the auspices of the US Government’s ‘War on Drugs’. In that film, Benicio Del Toro’s taciturn assassin Alejandro Gillick existed in a nebulous haze until the final act when his true motivations were made clear. Josh Brolin’s CIA ‘Special Activities’ agent Matt Graver drove the plot through his obfuscation and deliberately opaque guidance of Emily Blunt’s FBI agent Kate Macer. That air of confusion ensured audiences were kept in a perpetual state of wrong-footedness, giving director Denis Villeneuve an opportunity to explore the amoral atmosphere and ratchet up tension to an almost hypnotic degree.
Sicario screenwriter Taylor Sheridan penned a companion-piece, Soldado though without Villeneuve’s involvement (Villeneuve would going on to direct Blade Runner 2049). Italian filmmaker Stefano Sollima (who’s directed many episodes of the Italian TV Series Gomorrah) came aboard as his replacement. Sheridan’s new story focuses on the new money-spinner for drug cartels whose cocaine trafficking has been hindered by tighter border controls: people smuggling. When Islamic terrorists enter the US, hidden amongst the throngs of illegal immigrants attempting to cross the border, a spate of stateside suicide bombings follow. Prompted by public outrage at the terrorist attacks, the US Secretary of Defense (Matthew Modine) requests that Brolin’s CIA spook Matt Graver go ‘dirty’ in order to find a solution to the problem. The ‘dirty’ option is to unleash Alejandro Gillick (Benicio Del Toro), a former lawyer and family man turned vengeance-fuelled CIA assassin, to kidnap Isabela Reyes (Isabela Moner) the young daughter of a major Cartel boss and to (hopefully) start a war between the Cartels.
The scant character development is fleshed-out through deftly-handled action set pieces, of which there are a good number. There’s plenty of hardware and Call of Duty-style military fetishism on display (Michael Bay would be proud) however Soldado (aka Sicario 2 aka Sicario: Day of the Soldado as it’s called here in Australia) fails to deliver the added dimension that Villeneuve (and Cinematographer Roger Deakins) brought to the original, which is a haunting ethereal beauty amidst the dark, grim machismo. Where Sicario settled on an outsiders view of the horror and its pointlessness, seen from the perspective of Emily Blunt’s moralistic FBI agent, Sicario 2: Day of the Soldado drops us unguided into the violent futility. So despite the engaging story and Brolin and Del Toro’s solid-as-a-rock performances, it’s chopped-off at the knees by a third act conclusion that feels like a second act development and ultimately feels lacking because we haven’t felt anything and seem destined to leave the cinema feeling like Blunt’s character from the first film, overwhelmed by the violence and inhumanity yet ambivalent in the face of it.