Review of Sicario: Day of the Soldado (2018) by Andrew B — 05 Jul 2018

Heavy-handed, hard-headed and violent, Sicaro: Day of the Soldado (a loose follow-up to the lauded 2015 original minus director Denis Villenueve and actress Emily Blunt) runs a stark parallel to modern American foreign policy. By the end there are no winners or heroes and sometimes it gets hard to remember who you're pulling for.

If you missed the original Sicario, don't fret; Day of the Soldado isn't so much a direct sequel as it is a contextual follow-up. Yes the ham-fisted Josh Brolin, the delightfully deadly Benicio del Toro, and the subdued Jeffrey Donovan reprise their roles as Matt Graver, Alejandro Gillick and Steve Forsing respectively, but their goals remain the same: take down the Mexican cartels by any means necessary. Things escalate dramatically when a cascade suicide bombing (portrayed with disturbing realism in the film's opening moments as a mother and her young child tremble in fear before being blown to smithereens) decimates a Kansas City grocery store leaving fifteen Americans dead and countless more wounded. In a sequence that again echoes modern U.S. politics, the drug cartels smuggling undocumented immigrants across the border are blamed and the U.S. Secretary of Defense (a stone-faced Matthew Modine) brings in the morally ambiguous Graver to take the fight to the cartels by any means necessary. Somehow they justify that this can best be accomplished by kidnapping the 16-year-old daughter of cartel leader Carlos Reyes and pinning it on his rivals. Graver brings in Gillick (whose family, we're told, was killed by Reyes) to do the deed and away they go.

As anyone with a modicum of common sense (or human decency?) can tell you, this plan sucks. And after gunning down enough people in the streets of Mexico, Graver's team of mercenaries is betrayed by their Mexican police escorts. As the bodies pile up, the U.S. media takes notice just as the U.S. government identifies that the suicide bombers were actually from New Jersey and were not, in fact, smuggled in through the Mexican border. Whoops. As the press hounds the senseless violence taking place under his administration, the president decides it's best to just blow off the operation and kill the remaining witnesses including their young innocent captive. Loose ends and all that. Left isolated in the Mexican desert with the daughter of the man who killed his own family, Gillick finds his humanity and works to get Isabela Reyes (portrayed by 16-year-old Nickelodeon actress Isabela Moner, who is a fantastic find) across the U.S. border before it all comes crashing down.

While this is all pretty interesting and worthy of a feature release, Sicaro's greatest setback is its uneven pacing and delivery of these moments. Brolin is great in his role, but impossible to pull for, the action is frenetic but lacks emotional impact or depth, and the ending is a blatant cliffhanger that leaves the film's few important questions unanswered. But it's not all bad; the film's middle sequence revolving around del Toro and Moner fighting for survival in a Mexican wasteland is surprisingly touching and effective. Moner in particular steals the show; as the emotional heartbeat of the film, much of her best work is accomplished silently, especially in a memorable sequence that finds Gillick blasting one of Isabela's would-be assailants, leaving splashes of blood streaking across her striking face. It's a sobering reminder of who is most affected when superpowers like the U.S. carelessly flex their militarized muscle, which is something we'd all do well to remember.