Sicario - Film Review

Yes, I know I've been gone.

Sicario is directed by Denis Villeneuve, and stars Emily Blunt, Benicio del Toro, Josh Brolin, Daniel Kaluuya, and Jon Bernthal.

Plot
When drug violence worsens on the USA Mexico border, the FBI sends an idealistic agent, Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) on a mission to eradicate a drug cartel responsible for a bomb that had killed members of her team.

Review
I don't really know where to start with this. I guess I could start by saying that this is the second Denis Villeneuve film I've seen, the only other one being Blade Runner 2049, which if you read my ranking of 2017, you'd know it was my second favorite film of last year. I haven't seen anything else by him like Prisoners or Arrival.

I do want to point out that this can be a pretty bleak film, and it's not a very happy one either. In the opening, you see decomposing bodies hidden inside the wall of a house and the property is rigged with explosives, there's a scene where a woman is being choked by a man, and there is a scene later in the movie where an entire family is killed, but there are some entertaining scenes in it.

It's got a pretty bleak message too, no matter how much we fight, there's no winning or losing, nothing will get better. It's just going to be the same. Some of the stuff that the CIA does in this movie shows that what they do is about as bad as what the cartels do. At the end, Alejandro (Benicio del Toro) tries to get Kate to sign a paper saying what they did was legal. You see the characters going into Mexico through the desert, and they really don't look that different, it's just that one side has violence, the other side has cartels (well they do have violence too). It also shows that this is a regular occurrence for them, because at the end, there are these kids playing soccer (or football, depending on where you live), and they hear gunshots. They stop for a second and then continue playing.

I want to talk about how the movie looks. The movie looks fantastic. Especially with Denis Villeneuve's directing, and the cinematography. The night shots are actually filmed at night, which looks great. Also, they have scenes filmed with thermal vision and night vision and they just look amazing.

I guess I could continue with the story. If it weren't for Denis Villeneuve's directing, Taylor Sheridan's script, and Roger Deakins' cinematography, then this would just be a typical, by-the-numbers drug busting movie, but it's great.

Let's talk about the characters, Emily Blunt is great as Kate, our main character. She is an FBI officer who is getting introduced to how terrible the world can be, just some of the dirtiest, most grim stuff that drug cartels can do. You can definitely feel the shock that she goes through when she is working. She gets in over her head with this kind of stuff, which I'm sure someone new to this can do.

Benecio del Toro is great as Alejandro, he is not somebody you want to mess with. He even (possibly?) waterboards a guy, I don't know, as his junk is awfully close to that guy's face, but we just see a drain with a jug of water sitting next to it. He is brutal in this movie, he will kill children if he has too, as he kills the family of the man who killed his wife and daughter before killing him. Despite all that, he plays him really well. Also, I have never seen a wet willie that looked that painful.

Josh Brolin is great as Matt, a CIA agent who is also Alejandro's partner. This is a huge year for Josh Brolin, but more in that in my Sicario: Day of the Soldado review tomorrow. Anyway, he's just great and for a CIA agent, he wears open toed shoes. He used Kate and Reggie (Daniel Kaluuya) just so they could work in America and that they could have an FBI agent with them. But yeah, he's great.

Daniel Kaluuya is good as Reggie, a fellow FBI agent and friend of Kate. He pretty much tries to cheer her up while all this bad stuff is going on and he brings her to a bar, where she meets Ted (Jon Bernthal). Speaking of Ted...

Jon Bernthal is in the movie for just a little bit. He meets Kate at a bar when Reggie introduces him as a cop, so they go back to Kate's apartment and they start making but he takes some stuff out of his pocket and there was a blue and pink rubber band in there. Earlier in the movie, they showed that the drug cartel was using this when laundering money into an American bank. Kate sees this and they start fighting, which leads to him choking her, only to be ended by Benicio ex machina. Then he gets a wet willie from Alejandro which looks very painful.

When you think about it, you realize that Sicario has five actors in the MCU: Josh Brolin (Thanos), Benicio del Toro (The Collector), Daniel Kaluuya (W'Kabi), Jon Bernthal (Punisher), and Maximiliano Hernández (Agent Sitwell). Also, Emily Blunt was offered the role of Black Widow but turned it down. Also also, both Emily Blunt and Benicio del Toro were in The Wolfman (is that movie any good?)

Overall, Sicario is a great but very dark and bleak movie. If you haven't seen it, I would recommend it. If you're into these kind of movies though.

Sicario gets a 9/10.

Come back tomorrow for a review of Sicario: Day of the Soldado, which I saw today, but couldn't finish the review for.

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