Review of Sicario (2015) by Kotyonok — 14 Oct 2015

This is Heart of Darkness without much heart or darkness. It's the kind of movie that tries to shock you into feeling something by dangling statistics in front of your nose and proudly announcing "Hey, you hear that gunfire? Those aren't firecrackers! Aren't you scared now?".

It's anchored around Brolin's smug but ultimately uninteresting mystery man, Blunt's "experienced" FBI agent (who spends most of the movie with the same frightened-Bambi look on her face, occasionally adding a few tears), and Del Toro doing his best to add intensity to his cookie-cutter killer character (oh, of course you weren't supposed to guess who he was working for, even though someone told you in the first half-hour of the movie! oh, of course he has a token dead family thrown in when we're explaining his motives- how else could he feel sorry for our sobby FBI agent? etc.).

It's humorless. charmless, and banal. The people behind this movie don't even manage to capture the horrifying thrill you might get out of the fact that, for the people who live and work around these cartels, this violence is normal- they undercut that by having the male characters swagger, monologue, and lecture us about these terrible things like little boys trying to gross out their sisters. There is absolutely nothing of interest to be had in these two hours, and I don't know why so many people are giving it positive reviews.