Review: ‘Sicario’

“This is the land of wolves.”

“Sicario” sets itself apart from other drug movies by taking such an intense, in your face, this is how it really is approach to the story; this is about the ongoing drug war here in the Americas, where an outrageous demand for an illegal product in one country results in a massive amount of casualties in another, where governments take whatever approach they can to try to minimize the damage, and in which there are people willing to do some very questionable things for an outcome that ultimately may, if they are lucky, only chip away at the overall problem. How far are you willing to go for something you truly believe in? What can you sacrifice, in terms of those you know and even just yourself? Hard questions have hard answers, and sometimes arriving at those answers ends up being worse than simply not knowing. Ignorance is bliss, but it also exacerbates the situation because how can a problem be fixed if one pretends it doesn’t exist?

Kate (Emily Blunt) works on a kidnapping recovery SWAT team for the FBI, and the movie opens with a mission of theirs resulting in the discovery of a house related to a Mexican drug cartel. From this, Kate is recruited by some sandal-wearing fella named Matt (Josh Brolin) who introduced himself as an adviser for the Department of Defense, but Kate quickly doubts this apparent cover identity or outright lie or whatever it is. She joins him and some mysterious dude named Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro) on a joint task mission somehow related to the War on Drugs, though she is kept in the dark and must figure out what’s going on along the way. And as she discovers what they are doing, she becomes embroiled in an ethical quagmire, as she suspects much of their activity, though government sanctioned, is highly illegal, however, she recognizes that they are trying to gain some actual ground in the drug war, as opposed to the petty street level shit they are already doing and which isn’t making any difference.

Moral and ethical quagmires. That’s the name of the game. What are you willing to do for your cause? Whether you are the cartel drug kingpin or the people trying to stop them, you have to do some tough stuff to be able to even sniff at what you want. And with Kate having spent the first couple years of her service with this SWAT team and only uncovering more danger and horrible shit without actually making a difference with the overall problem, she is willing to at least question what she knows and go along with the mission for as long as she can without feeling like she’s been irreversibly corrupted. But how does one know when they reach that point? What if it happens and it is too late to turn back?

What’s interesting about “Sicario” is how it approaches this stuff, it tackles these questions rather head on, and nothing is sugar coated or made easy for the viewer. The horrific problems are instead shown to us over and over so that we can understand what is truly at stake. We don’t see the effects of the drug war here in the States in the same way it happens in Mexico, as we rarely hear about the atrocities that happen there in the name of pushing drugs. Every now and then a story will drift up to our media about something crazy like a truck load of headless corpses being dumped out in the middle of some busy intersection as a warning to everyone else, and we’ll collectively shake our heads and bemoan the violence and then we’ll go back to our cocaine and heroin and whatever else they can make money on, and the cycle will continue because of that disconnect. “Sicario” seeks to obliterate that disconnect, as it forces you to take a long hard look at the consequences of this drug war.

And surely it is a war, that is not a euphemism in any way, it is not a way to scare people into siding with the government agencies, it is simply the truth. Heavy weaponry is necessary, and heads must always be on swivels because the danger can come from anywhere and can look like anyone. You’ve never seen a traffic jam so intense and filled with danger as the one that happens in this movie. This danger is almost omnipresent in this movie, so that even when there is a rare lull in the danger, it still sneaks in there anyway, so that is becomes inescapable. And with the few moments of action and violence, it never gets to the point of showboating or style over substance; this movie isn’t trying to wow you with the violence, it wants you to think about it and understand it and ponder whether or not it is necessary. As a result, there is just the most palpable sense of dread throughout this thing, as Kate realizes that even a successful mission will mean some horrible shit will be happening in one way or another. What do you do when the lines get blurred between the good guys and the bad guys? What happens when it all becomes a grey area, like looking through a thermal lens?

This movie also takes its time, so that right from the beginning, when a raid on a house in a sun bleached desert landscape kicks off the horrors to follow, the whole thing feels like a slow descent into Hell, a Hell with no bottom because things keep getting more complicated and dangerous and soul crushing for Kate the idealist, who wants to always tell the truth and do what is right but who is quickly losing her grasp on what exactly would be constituted as “right” in these situations. Nothing is easy here and it doesn’t come easy and that struggle is what makes this movie resonate. She has entered a land of demons, some of them out in the open, some of them in disguise, some of them internal and all her own to battle alone, and this creates a roiling atmosphere of electric danger, like lightning constantly going off in the sky above, threatening at any second to come crashing down to the ground below.

“Sicario” gets intense and never pretends to offer any easy answers to these tough questions it brings up, and it may just be one of the most dour and unforgiving films to play in mainstream theaters this year. What does the rah-rah-sis-boom-bah crowd think of such a film, painting such a vivid and stark picture of a drug war that is failing because it is unstoppable? Who is to blame for this mess? And what can be done to stop it?