Sicario (2015) [Blu-ray]
Action | Crime | Drama | Mystery | Thriller

Tagline: The border is just another line to cross.

Sicario - Spanish for hitman or hired killer (especially when referring to Latin American drug cartels)

A young female FBI agent joins a secret CIA operation to take down a Mexican cartel boss, a job that ends up pushing her ethical and moral values to the limit.

Storyline: When drug violence worsens on the USA Mexico border, the FBI sends an idealistic agent, Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) on a mission to eradicate a drug cartel responsible for a bomb that had killed members of her team. Written by Gusde

Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, December 30, 2015 -- There have been a number of really interesting offerings detailing the kind of weirdly dysfunctional "sibling" relationship between El Paso, Texas and Juarez, Mexico, two cities which butt up against each other but which have experienced radically different histories due to both various socioeconomic forces as well as what are perceived as either successes or failures of law enforcement. The vast bulk of the raging criminal activity in Juarez is due to the region's active drug trade, and there have been both documentaries (Narco Cultura) and fictional entries (The Bridge: The Complete First Season) which have dealt with various issues arising from these (at times literally) underground activities. It's commendable, then, that Sicario manages to revisit both this subject matter and this actual location with a fresh urgency and disturbingly visceral energy. Sicario gets its title from the Latin word Sicarius, meaning "dagger man", which was actually used in the early Christian era to describe early Jewish zealots who undertook assassinations to attain their desired political (and/or religious) ends. (Armchair etymologists may know that the very word "assassination" has its own link to zealots, in this case Islamic followers of Hassan-i-Sabbah who were supposedly partakers of hashish, thus making them Hashishin or Hashshashin, which ultimately evolved into the modern word.) The appellation is shorthanded here to simply mean "hitman", and while Sicario takes a fairly circuitous route to finally get to what turns out to be a central killing, there is no dearth of violent deaths on the way to that sequence. Some of the real life intrigue surrounding Juarez's incipient drug trade has spilled into daily headlines courtesy of the saga of Joaquín Guzmán, otherwise known as "El Chapo", and Sicario perhaps trades on that infamy by positing a top secret drug lord hiding out in Mexico whom a coterie of various international agents want to bring to justice.

Before Sicario journeys across the southern border, it begins with a harrowing FBI SWAT takedown of a supposed hostage scene in Chandler, Arizona. Agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) is in charge of the operation, which initially seems to go according to plan, albeit with several casualties on the part of the bad guys. It's only when another agent discovers a gruesome secret tucked away behind the walls of the house the feds have taken by storm that Kate and her cohorts realize they've stumbled onto something with a wider impact than a "mere" hostage crisis. When an unexpected calamity then follows, Kate is thrown for an emotional loop, as is her right hand man, Reggie Wayne (Daniel Kaluuya). When the two agents are subsequently called to some sort of high level meeting, they assume the worst, feeling that they're going to be called on the carpet for that very calamity.

Instead, Kate finds herself in a confusing situation where she's asked to volunteer for a mission which involves mysterious CIA agent and Department of Defense advisor Matt Graver (Josh Brolin), and his equally enigmatic partner Alejandro Gillick (Benicio del Toro). Both of these men are extremely laconic, unwilling to give up too much information about what exactly is going on, something that keeps both Kate and the audience in a state of some befuddlement throughout much of Sicario's initial setup. The stated purpose of the team's mission is to extradite the brother of the leader of Mexico's biggest drug cartel, in an attempt to gain further information about where this long hidden leader is. While Kate is initially told they're going to El Paso, they actually end up in Juarez, where a tense set piece unfolds involving scores of both American and Mexican law enforcement types. While neither Graver nor Gillick are very forthcoming, Gillick at least has the grace to tell Kate to be careful of the Mexican police, since they aren't necessarily "good guys", a piece of advice that comes in handy when the American team is caught in a traffic jam on the by now iconic Bridge of the Americas that spans the space between El Paso and Juarez.

It's not fair to describe in much detail what eventually ends up happening, other than to say that the "real" reason behind the entire mission turns out to be somewhat more shaded than simply bringing a bad guy to justice. What Sicario depicts so viscerally is (as one of the supplements on this Blu-ray describes it) the "machine" of both the drug trade and the law enforcement attempts to curtail it. Sicario has a number of outstanding sequences, but it tends to tip over into needless hyperbolism at times, including at least two different moments where Kate is reduced to traditional "damsel in distress" material.

Those potential missteps aside, the film routinely delivers some gut punches as it moves to its incredibly forceful climax, when Gillick's tortured operative finally becomes the focal character and the final denouement is offered to the audience. In fact Sicario engages in a bit of bait and switch in a way, seeming to posit the film as Kate's story when really it's Gillick's tale that ends up being the through line and the element which provides most of the film's disturbing emotional resonance.

Sicario repeatedly exploits a kind of almost existential angst as it explores the devastation left by the illicit drug industry. This devastation is probably nowhere more present than in what initially seems like odd interstitial sequences showing the kind of squalid home life of a Mexican policeman named Silvio (Maximiliano Hernández). When screenwriter Taylor Sheridan finally weaves this character into the overall arc rather late in the film, the seemingly inescapable cycle of death, despair and violence appears to be one of the few unwounded survivors to outlast any momentary maelstrom.

Occasional silliness like Blunt's Kate answering an acolyte who asks her what to tell superiors with a curt "The truth" notwithstanding, Sicario offers a twisting and turning enterprise that keeps the audience, much like Kate herself, in the dark for quite a bit of the dangerous journey. There are some gut wrenching sequences handled pretty near perfectly here by director Denis Villeneuve, and at least a couple of the horrendous deaths that accrue throughout the film will probably catch some viewers completely off guard. The emotional content here is increasingly fraught with angst, making Sicario a bit difficult to stomach at times. Technical merits are first rate, and Sicario comes Highly recommended.

[CSW] -3.8- This movie was anything but slow or boring. The actors do a great job, no overacting, all very professional. Because the main character (played by Emily Blunt) doesn't really know what's happening or unfolding, the viewer doesn't know either and that creates mystery and real tension. I found the movie had an edge to it as, bit by bit, you begin to understand what is taking place -- through the main character. This is not your average drug cartel, drug busting, borderland movie. I thought the script gave it a new take, a new angle. Sorry for the lack of details but this movie views best with nothing revealed.
[V4.5-A5.0/] MPEG-4 AVC - No D-Box.
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