Review: SICARIO

SICARIO  (CRIME-THRILLER/DRAMA)
3.5 out of 4 stars
Directed by Denis Villeneuve
Starring: Emily Blunt, Benicio del Toro, Josh Brolin, Daniel Kaluuya, Victor Garber, Jon Bernthal, Jeffrey Donovan, Raoul Trujillo, Julio Cedillo, Hank Rogerson, Bernardo Saracino, Maximiliano Hernandez, Jesus Navarez-Castillo
Rated R for strong violence, grisly images, and language.
121 minutes
Verdict: Gorgeously shot and full of visceral thrills, SICARIO is also a chilling, thoughtful meditation on an unwinnable conflict and its intimate consequences.
YOU MAY BE INTERESTED IN SICARIO IF YOU LIKED:
TRAFFIC  (2000)
PRISONERS  (2013)
THE HURT LOCKER  (2009)
TRAINING DAY  (2001)
EDGE OF TOMORROW  (2014)

No war is a 'good war'.  As former president Jimmy Carter said when accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, "War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will never learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children."  War breeds moral decay and a war without a clearly defined enemy, like the so-called "War on Terror" or "War on Drugs", creates an environment lacking clearly defined ethics.  Such is the world on display in Denis Villeneuve's deliciously intense and admirably thoughtful dramatic thriller SICARIO.
Emily Blunt stars as Kate Macer, a straight arrow FBI agent picked up by cavalier Department of Defense adviser Matt Graver (Josh Brolin) and his steely-eyed partner Alejandro Gillick (Benicio del Toro) to help take down a major cartel boss.  Although initially eager to see the crime bosses who killed two of her men in an Arizona raid brought to justice, Macer is gradually disillusioned by the increasingly hazy ethics and improvisational procedure that her new bosses at the DOD and the CIA practice and expect her to take part in as well.
The cinematography by Roger Deakins is gorgeous, emphasizing the sharp contrasts of vast Mexican landscapes and densely packed cities with intimate, claustrophobic perspectives, as well as the distinct dark and the light, all itself in contrast to the thoroughly murky nature of characters' actions and motivations.  For all its weight, SICARIO is also an intense, exciting thriller.  In one of the great set pieces, Graver's team becomes trapped in a traffic jam at the border while transporting a high-profile extracted prisoner, and in the midst of dozens of tightly-packed cars full of civilians, they become aware of cartel men within the jam sent to prevent their crossing back over.  The drums in Johann Johannsson's musical score beat menacingly as paranoia sets in, and to Macer's horror, for the rest on their team, the conflict is reduced to them vs. us with numerous civilians in the crossfire.  The sequence is beautifully executed, visually and psychologically, playing off the landscape and the chaotic anarchy within the neat ordering of backed-up vehicles.  It's one of the most exciting action scenes outside of a Mad Max movie that I've seen this year.

It's an urgent and angry film, a powerful exposé of an apparently hopeless and ever worsening situation on an intimate level.  It's a fairly well-known sentiment; the War on Drugs is a failure which has only escalated violence in Mexico and around the U.S.-Mexico border, but SICARIO takes the plunge into the dark, nitty-gritty of this.  Individual human beings are so susceptible to moral failure and misunderstanding, and the pursuit of justice and order all too easily descends into vengeance and chaos.  It is the nature of the cycle of violence that one's justice is another one's injustice, and each begets another in an ever-escalating, ever-perpetuating back and forth.  Drugs themselves are very much on the sidelines while the war revolves around responding to each side's increased pressure and violence, and neither side is so much a 'side' as they are the idea of one.  The film begins in Chandler, Arizona, where the Mexican drug cartels have made an exceptionally rare move on U.S. soil to the horror of government agencies and media, and we as the audience are startled too, but by the film's close, the war zone is still very much alive, but now tucked away south of the border where we find it so much more tolerable.

Images via Lionsgate