At Sicario’s outset, FBI agent Kate Marcer is fed up: Years spent kicking down Arizona doors on the Bureau’s SWAT force have yielded only trivial successes against the Mexican drug cartels, which have grown in reach and ruthlessness. That disillusionment makes Kate (Emily Blunt) and partner Reggie (Daniel Kaluuya) prime candidates for a new inter-agency task force led Matt Graver (Josh Brolin), a swaggering but evasive operative who she quickly makes as CIA. Before she can ask too many questions, Kate finds herself in a militarized convoy, rolling through Juarez, Mexico with dubious figures like agency “consultant” Alejandro Gillick (Benicio del Toro). In the process of extracting a drug lord’s brother to the U.S., Matt’s team is drawn into a gun battle with the local cartel—smack in the middle of the jam-packed Paso del Norte border crossing. Things escalate from there, as Kate learns that the task force’s suspect strategies and objectives are more Game of Thrones than Law & Order.
Gnawing and cold-blooded, Sicario serves as a showcase for French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve’s impressive ability to establish an enveloping atmosphere of dread. That talent receives an invaluable assist from Jóhann Jóhannsson’s oppressive, buzzing score, not to mention master cinematographer Roger Deakins’ camera, which drifts menacingly over desert scrub and gulches and glares down from a drone’s pitiless perspective. Blunt, as usual, shines at the front of a uniformly excellent cast. Sicario is a lesser work than Villeneuve’s masterpiece Enemy, but the screenplay by actor Taylor Sheridan functions outstandingly as a hard-bitten depiction of the bloody chess waged by criminals and governments alike. A pessimistic and morally pitch-black thriller, Sicario will likely leave some viewers sour and shell-shocked, but that should not diminish the film’s aesthetic achievements or its significance as a harrowing critique of the War on Drugs.
Sicario opens Friday, October 3 in wide release.
