Movie Breakdown: Sicario: Day Of The Soldado (Noah)
Pre-Screening Stance:
The first film is a stone-cold masterpiece. Bleak, visually challenging, acted to a tee by a brilliant cast – the type of movie that feels so complete when the credits roll, sequel isn’t even a concept that brushes up against it. But this is Hollywood folks, so, hey, why not? That said, its got most of the cast back (sorry Emily Blunt), one of the best screenwriters scribbling (Taylor Sheridan) and an Italian director with some credible chops. I’m cautiously optimistic.
Post-Screening Ramble:
Sicario: Day of the Soldado isn’t necessarily a sequel anyone needed. As stated, the original film was a closed circuit, an unrelenting, almost abstract view of the American/Mexican drug war with no space or need for a second entry. That said, part deux actually stands up pretty well. The American/Mexican battle/relationship with drugs is still raging, but when a terrorist attack hits the homeland and one of the attackers crosses the southern border of the United States illegally, Brolin’s Special Forces commander Matt Graver has to recruit his preferred sicario (Benecio del Toro’s lawyer-turned-hitman Alejandro) to start a war between the drug cartels. Things go badly, quickly, and Alejandro is left cut off from the troops with a dozen or so dead Mexican cops behind him and the daughter of a drug lord as his ward. Where Sicario was a focused, if artfully spacey, bullet with a clear vision and philosophy on the woes of drug-running across the America/Mexico border (a political film with bursts of action), Sicario 2 is the reverse: an action film with a backbone of loose political thought. What starts with Catherine Keener and Matthew Modine twirling their mustaches and pontificating on the acceptable amorality of war slowly tightens into a cat-and-mouse chase flick with del Toro on the run. And though director Stefano Sollima balances the action with the politics for a while, the film slips into a dumber gear in the final act – trading intelligence for grenades, super survival and a final shot that could’ve been pulled from a crime comic book. Though Day of the Soldado isn’t the brainy, bleak film that Sicario was, it stands on its own as something else: an artistically centered action film cruising in the slow lane of social justice.
One Last Thought:
There’s rumors of a third film in the series! And you know what, even though after seeing this film I don’t have any need for another, I’d certainly watch it.
