Sicario: Day of the Soldado – I Asked For This?

Sicario is one of the best films of the decade, and one of the most brutal. An existential thriller centered on the war on drugs and its ravaging effect on the Mexican-American border, it follows an idealistic FBI agent (Emily Blunt) who joins a crack team who aren’t above breaking the law to wage their war on the Mexican drug cartel. The rest of the film spends its time slowly and methodically bending Blunt’s morale and beliefs over its knee until its back breaks. Probably the most intense part of the film is when the narrative shifts focus to Benicio Del Toro’s character on his mission to kill the drug lord who murdered his family, where the tension becomes so great that it becomes a borderline horror movie by the end. Del Toro, Josh Brolin and screenwriter Taylor Sheridan make a return for the sequel, while Emily Blunt and director Denis Villeniuve do not, and the lack of both of their presences can clearly be felt.

Set a few years after the first Sicario, the cartels have changed their business model from drugs to human trafficking, and after a series of suicide bombings from terrorists that came in through the border, they’re blamed for it. Department of Defense consultant Matt Graver (Josh Brolin) is brought in. His plan: a false flag operation to pit two major cartel syndicates in a gang war with each other. He enlists his old partner Alejandro Gillard (Benicio Del Toro), offering to wipe his record clean and give him a chance to extend his revenge on those who killed his family. Part of the plan involves the kidnapping and staged rescue of the daughter of a wealthy drug pusher (Isabela Moner), but when the job goes awry, she and Alejandro barely escape with their lives and must cross the desert to safety.

The biggest fundamental problem that Day of the Soldado faces is that it’s a sequel to a movie that didn’t lend itself to one, not in the sense that it wasn’t popular or that nobody asked for one (although nobody did ask for one as far as I can tell), but that much like Jurassic Park or First Blood, the story was self-contained and had a definite conclusion, and continuing the story would betray the whole ethos of the original. (Fun fact about First Blood: the book it’s based on ends with John Rambo killing himself.) Where the first Sicario was a cynical but morally conflicted look at the quagmire of the US’s handling of border patrol, Day of the Soldado is a gleefully grim race to the bottom, and without Emily Blunt’s voice of reason there to rein in everyone’s worst inhibitions, the whole thing just becomes a joyless slog. (Not that the first Sicario was a feel-good laugh fest or anything, but it at least had a point.)

Blunt’s presence isn’t the only one whose presence is lacking. Part of what made the first so engaging was the masterful direction from Denis Villeneuve and the beautiful cinematography from Roger Deakins. Stefanno Sollima isn’t a bad director, but the lack of craftsmanship leads to a less tense experience. Taylor Sheridan’s script is also sorely missing the nuance that made the first Sicario, Hell or High Water and Wind River so thought provoking. I’m half convinced this script was written from a mad-lib of Trump tweets. The main task feels less real and more like a Call of Duty mission, or like one of Alex Jones’s daily rants. Where I had once felt ambivalent, I now felt contempt. What was once ambiguous has now become mean-spirited. The only one who remains relatively unchanged is Matt, where Josh Brolin plays for the third time this year a gruff, sullen pragmatist who’s fine with killing as long as it’s for “the greater good”. Yipee.

The only moment of levity we get is when Alejandro and the drug lord’s daughter are alone together. Ignoring the fact that turning him into an action hero defeats the entire purpose, Del Toro and Isabel Moner have decent chemistry reminiscent of what Hugh Jackman and Dafne Keene shared in Logan, and one of the best scenes is a much needed quiet moment when they take refuge with a deaf man and his family in the desert. But even then, they have to break that up with more bland gun fights, a fake-out death, and a subplot about a teenager (Elijah Rodriguez) learning the ropes as a border smuggler that seemingly goes nowhere but just ends up being more sequel bait. Yipee.

Bottom line, Sicario: Day of the Soldado is an anemic, unfulfilling sequel that suffers from a bad case of identity crisis. Does it want to be another morally ambiguous take on the war on drugs and the volatile relation between the US and Mexican borderlands, or does it want to be just another action series? Whatever it wants to be, I don’t have to be there to watch it embarrass itself.

4/10