Review of Sicario (2015) by Tony D — 04 Feb 2017

I found Sicario like a high-tech, action-packed, 2-hour Donald Trump ad. The film depicts a Mexico overrun with "bad hombres," with "wolves," spilling over and under an ever-present but never adequate border fence. Idealistic FBI agents like Emily Blunt and Daniel Kaluuya can't effectively prosecute this international crime: They're always too late, the violence keeps getting more horrific. Only ruthless, lawless, equally criminal strategies and tactics seem effective, where the corrupting influences of drug money and force spill out from an anarchic Latin America into the US. Josh Brolin's CIA squad and the Colombian-hired "sicario" or hitman, Benecio del Toro, need to mount an ambitious covert op.

We Yanquis do come in for brief flourishes of rhetorical condemnation: A villain accuses the US of "showing" our neighbors how to be truly brutal; Brolin complains helplessly about the "20%" (?) of Americans buying Colombian cocaine.

But these deflections don't pack anything like the visceral punch of the lawless violence, the decapitations, the sense of a spreading war zone conveyed in virtually every scene in the film.

I just rolled my eyes when a character who's "seen to much" is advised to retreat from the advancing "wolves" to a "small town." There are small towns with drug epidemics, gangs, and corrupt cops, cabrón. And there are cities with more rule of law than those small towns, or the border hellscape painted here.