Sicario: Day of the Soldado (2018)
Directed by: Stefano Sollima
Premise: A sequel to the 2015 film. A CIA agent (Josh Brolin) recruits hitman Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro) in a plot to manipulate Mexican drug cartels into a drug war. But the kidnapping of a drug lord’s teenage daughter spins out of control.
What Works: Like its predecessor, Sicario: Day of the Soldado
takes a gritty approach to its subject and possesses violent intensity
throughout. This is no Hollywood shoot-’em-up adventure. The Sicario films are grounded in reality and the violence carries weight and trauma. Day of the Soldado
presents its violence in a way that is very effective. The opening
sequence of suicide bombers destroying a shopping center is terrifying
and saddening, a far cry from the way violence is usually presented in a
Hollywood action picture, and the film includes an outstanding
sequence in which a caravan of Americans are ambushed in the Mexican
desert. Day of the Soldado takes the audience deeper into the
drug trade, including sequences of illegal immigration across the
Mexico-U.S.A. border. The film offers a vivid portrait of the
precarious journey across the border and the way cartels and narcotics
fit into it. Benicio Del Toro returns as Alejandro, a mysterious hitman
with a vendetta against the cartels. This is the kind of intense and
morally ambiguous role that Del Toro does well and he’s paired with
Isabela Moner as the teenage daughter of a drug lord. There is a
tension in their relationship and the young actress is impressive.
Moner’s passionate teenager is an effective counterpoint to Del Toro’s
quiet intensity and as she is exposed to the violence of the drug trade
her transformation is the most resonant part of the movie.
What Doesn’t: The original Sicario was a descent into the moral ambiguity of covert warfare, not unlike Zero Dark Thirty.
The hook of the 2015 film was in the way it gradually revealed the
truth about the characters and the nature of military operations
against the drug cartels. Coming into the sequel, that secret is
already out of the bag. Day of the Soldado does not include
Emily Blunt, who played an upstanding FBI agent who pieced together the
truth and objected to the illegality of the operations. Her absence
frees up the filmmakers to plunge into the moral and logistical morass
hinted at in the first film. But without Blunt’s character, or someone
like her, no one vocalizes the moral and legal problems that the movie
raises nor do the filmmakers dramatize them effectively. Day of the Soldado
sets up themes of escalation and corruption but very little of that is
realized on the screen. Part of the problem is the conception of the
story. Del Toro’s character and his CIA and DEA allies incite a drug
war but we have no idea who the different factions are. Violence just
erupts and it is unclear who is doing what to whom or why. That may be a
deliberate choice; the violence is chaotic and random but it also
lacks meaning. And that is a more fundamental problem with Day of the Soldado. There are some ideas here but the filmmakers don’t commit to them. The story is meandering and has a haphazard feel.
Bottom Line: The Sicario sequel is both better and worse than its predecessor. The sequel delves deeper into what was established in the first film but the story is flimsy and doesn’t follow through on its implications.
Episode: #708 (July 22, 2018)