This film is like watching kittens drown for two hours straight.
I need a f@$%ing drink after watching Sicario—something heavy to make me forget such a grim, desolate and completely unoriginal film. I may have been intrigued by Sicario if I’d only seen 10 films in my life, but where it stands Sicario lacks any stimulating content—it’s bleak, boring and unbelievably cliché. How can a film with such a successful director be more predictable than Taken 3? Than The Expendables 3!? There’s little attempt at comedy, and the bits which exist feel drained and stale. The film is so obsessed with violence and death that it forgets significant character development. I hated most characters in various ways—some were monsters, others were assholes, wimps, idiots or a displeasing combination. The only characters I didn’t hate were the extras, and that’s because they didn’t do anything noteworthy—in summary, I didn’t care for anyone. Sicario feels as if it was made to piss me off, and succeeds in doing so magnificently—hitting practically every one of my hot buttons.
Sicario follows a righteous FBI SWAT agent named Kate (Emily Blunt), who’s reassigned to a CIA Delta Force team lead by Matt Graver (Josh Brolin)—the most loathsome character to appear in 2015 media. Their mission (or so it seems) is to cross borders into Juárez, Mexico where they will be extraditing Guillermo, brother to cartel boss Manuel Díaz. Accompanying them is Matt’s partner Alejandro Gillick (Benicio del Toro), who befriends Kate before SPOILERS BEGIN: utterly betraying her. SPOILERS END Oh, and the rest of this review will contain major spoilers because I couldn’t care less about spoiling this awful film, so MAJOR SPOILERS THROUGHOUT THE REMAINING REVIEW!!!
Sicario uses every trope in the book. In fact, the film became unpredictable by dramatically using clichés so overused, I wrongly assumed director Denis Villeneuve (whose previous films include the stunning epic Prisoners, and intriguing thriller Enemy) wouldn’t stoop to such lows. How many times has the line (or similar variation) “it wasn’t personal” been said in cinema and television? How often has it been answered with “for me it was”? I know there’s a version in The Godfather, License to Kill, Taken, and the recent Captain America: The Winter Soldier—as well as a satirized deconstruction in the 1998 romance-comedy You’ve Got Mail. Yet here it is again, both phrases being said dead seriously. I apologize to the adjacent theater viewers for my “inappropriate” outburst at the scene (the only occurrence where I found humor in the film), but I KNEW it was coming, I just KNEW it! How couldn’t I after sitting through 110 minutes of by-the-book action clichés, disguised (ironically) by characters performing gruesome actions not by-the-book.
There’s a scene where the Delta Force team start a firefight against local cartel members, killing every single thug in a traffic jam. “This will make the national news!” one member says, “Are you kidding me,” retorts another, “this won’t even make the front page of El Paso.” Why the hell would an experienced Delta Force member say such stupidity? He should clearly know it wouldn’t make national news. The scene pans over the bloody corpses while the Delta Force team casually drive off—citizen drivers treating the event as a briefly intriguing, yet ordinary event. Earlier the audience gets visuals of headless corpses hanging from a bridge and rotting bodies lined up behind drywall. Whether or not this is accurate to Mexican daily life isn’t the problem, rather, the problem is how much emphasis the film stresses on these scenes. “OHHH, look at how horrible their life is!” the audience is supposed to think, “Multiple people killed on the street isn’t even newsworthy…I didn’t know Mexico was so bad…I’m shocked at such horrible brutality!” After all these years of graphic films and video games, I’m desensitized to mindless media violence. If you want to shock me with brutality, I need names, faces, and characterization to go with the deaths—not nameless, faceless (sometimes literally) bodies I know nothing about. I want sympathy for humans, not obligatory pity for corpses.
The protagonist is all wrong—if anything the film should have focused on Alejandro. Kate is completely out of her element, oblivious to what she’s supposed to be doing. Her naïve sense of justice—in addition to being completely used—always makes her two steps behind the CIA’s true motives until the very end (where it’s too late to change anything). By sharing Kate’s perspective, the audience is forced to endure the same grueling frustration. Personal peeve here, but I HATE it when the main character is kept out of the loop, and I hate it, even more, when said character’s duped till the end. There’s a trope known as the Faux Action Female—the definition can vary, but it usually refers to a female character who’s shown and/or talked about having great potential (both mentally and physically), yet shows no such potential as the film, book, and/or series advances. Sicario’s beginning build’s Kate up as the top SWAT member in her sector, displaying much skill and promise in the way she leads the opening raid (Kate’s boss refers to her as one of their best). Yet throughout the remaining film, Kate’s mocked, bullied, pushed around, tricked, tormented, humiliated, traumatized, and (as mentioned above) completely used.
Her character goes from bright and strong to single-minded and weak—“a frightened child” as Alejandro describes her, and he’s right. Kate isn’t a strong protagonist, she’s a naïve, frightened sheep in a land of wolves. By Sicario’s climax, Kate becomes completely overshadowed by Alejandro, who ends up stealing the spotlight for the major scenes. The last scene has Alejandro calmly asking Kate to sign a paper claiming everything the CIA did was legal (which, unquestionably, it wasn’t). When Kate refuses—as it goes against everything she stands for—Alejandro turns his gun on her, claiming it’ll be “her suicide”. Kate breaks down and signs the paper, with the scene ending on another agonizing cliché as Kate is unable to shoot Alejandro as he gradually walks away. Failing to stand on her beliefs removes Kate’s last remaining strong characteristic, and when taking into consideration Kate’s the ONLY prominent female throughout the film…well, misogyny certainly begins floating around in the mind—if not misogynistic, then at least a very poor female representation. In fact, Sicario’s only prominent female and black characters are both consistently duped, overpowered, and made into fools by the primarily white cast throughout the film…some food for thought.
It’s Alejandro who should have been Sicario’s protagonist, or at LEAST been given a more visual backstory. With all the corpses being showcased, I would think Sicario understood the “show, don’t tell” concept for visual storytelling…but it doesn’t. Director Villeneuve instead decides to have Matt explain Alejandro’s past, during the finale, in an incredibly patronizing way to both Sara and the audience. The backstory is nothing more than a cheap ploy to alter audience perspective on Alejandro’s unethical tactics. Matt even adds a “yeah, that’s right” after concluding the story…YEAH, THAT’S RIGHT—as if Matt couldn’t be any more a douchebag, asshole, son-of-a-B!@CH scumbag, director Villeneuve has him end a tragic backstory with quite possibly the smuggest, conceited phrase ever. Its bad manipulation and a piss poor way to try and create empathy for Alejandro. Here’s an idea, instead of developing a random police trafficker’s backstory, why not use said time to visually show Alejandro’s past? Start off using short clips here and there—purposely vague on who they’re about—before gradually revealing them to be about Alejandro. Therefore, by Sicario’s finale, Alejandro’s past has been expressively revealed through visual representation—giving the audience both direct empathy and a better understanding towards his brutal actions.
What exactly is Sicario’s overall message? That life sucks in Mexico; that it’s a horrible place where evil people breed evil people and the goodwill either suffer or succumb to the corruption? Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange has a similar message set in its dystopian England, only difference being it’s exceptionally well-written, told from the right perspective, incredibly entertaining, thoroughly engaging, completely original, and a fascinating film to contemplate. Sicario, on the other hand, is poorly written, entirely cliché, needlessly mean-spirited, told from the wrong perspective, unbearably grim, completely humorless, exceedingly dull, and expressively depressing. But it does have beautiful cinematography…so I guess if themes, characters, and plot aren’t your thing, then Sicario’s the ideal film. Such horrid directing has guaranteed Sicario a spot on my worst films of 2015.