Review of Sicario: Day of the Soldado (2018) by K Nife C — 04 Jul 2018

Within the first 10 minutes of Hitman: Dia del Soldier, the sequel immediately sets itself politically antithetical to Sicario. The film opens with a text explaining that there are thousands of people smuggled across the U.S.-Mexico border for profit by Mexican Drug cartels. It then proceeds to show multiple jihadists blowing themselves up in Kansas City (where I was coincidentally watching the film) because, what better way to prove your Islamic extremist point than by smuggling across the border and traveling 1000 miles to blow yourself up at a Dillons? This all helps the cartels, of course, because once you hear about a terror attack, you immediately want to do a line of coke.

The rest of the first act plays out like any paranoid, second grade reading level Fox News adherent's wet dream. Boogey boogey boogey! Mexicans are smuggling in terrorists so that the borders will have more security forces placed there, all just to make drug prices go up. Since ending the War on Drugs would be too simple and straight forward, Josh Brolin and Benicio del Toro carry out a series of false flag cartel hits culminating in the kidnapping of a cartel king's scrappy teenage daughter. This is all to provoke more cartel violence that will perpetuate the perpetual cycle of cartel violence. Just like the preface text, it's skipping a few logical steps on the way to "Step 3: Profit". It sounds like a good enough plan to justify production cost for the film. Cue jingoistic military porn, then rinse and repeat. They follow the action beats of the first film without any clear sense of purpose and without Roger Deakin's cinematography.

The rest of the film just rambles with brief character moments from Brolin and del Toro that add nothing to the the first film and hardly make the planned third installment seem all that enticing. This is an absolutely unnecessary film. Whereas Sicario is a study of how corruption infests every echelon of our justice department yet is a necessary evil in the day to day proceedings on and around the border, this film sets these themes by the way side to focus on characters who elicited little sympathy in the first place. The trauma and disillusion we experienced with Emily Blunt's character is replaced with only the visceral spectacle of being shot by both sides. It's ineffective and ultimately pointless. I'm sure Taylor Sheridan felt the need to write this as it's his baby, but sorely lacking in these proceedings is a clear purpose or his usual righteous socio-political subtext. Sadly, giant robots couldn't have given this movie less depth.