Written by Katherine Murray.
An unholy mash-up of No Country for Old Men and Silence of the Lambs, Sicario defames the city of Juarez, the FBI, and the CIA without telling us anything we don’t already know.
When I asked for Emily Blunt to be a detective, this is not what I had in mind. In Sicario, she plays FBI agent Kate Macer, a kidnapping specialist who gets pulled into a joint task force to investigate the operations of a Mexican drug cartel in America. From the moment she accepts the assignment, Kate is kept in the dark about most of her team’s objectives and shocked by the behaviour of the CIA agents she’s working with. Motivated by the hope that she can make a real difference and help to improve life for people both north and south of the border, she stays on, even as the situation looks more and more grim. Also on the task force is the mysterious Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro), who always has Kate’s back in a crisis, but refuses to answer questions about who he works for or what his role is. There are twists and turns as the story goes on, but the upshot is that Kate is disillusioned when All is Revealed.
Sicario is technically well-made, and I would never try to argue that it isn’t. It’s shot with both frankness and care, the score is deliciously creepy, and it manages to make a shoot-out in stopped traffic just as tense and exciting as a car chase. Emily Blunt and Benicio Del Toro are every bit as awesome as you’d want them to be, and Josh Brolin turns in a good performance as the task force leader, Matt Graver. That said, the story’s kind of annoying and, in order to explain why it’s annoying, I have to tell you how it ends. Which means I spoil all the twists and turns for you from this point on.
Here’s the deal: the CIA’s ultimate goal is to help the Columbians take over the drug trade in Mexico, with the understanding that they will stop the violence from spilling over to the US. Kate doesn’t find that out until the movie’s final act, when it’s too late for her to stop them. She also finds out that the CIA needs an FBI agent with them as a technicality, so that they have the legal authority to operate within US borders – meaning, the entire reason she was invited to join the task force was because she was motivated to get revenge on the drug cartel after they killed two of her guys, but ignorant about who the major players were and what standard operating procedure was in Narcotics. They purposely kept her in the dark because they want her to sign a piece of paper saying that she observed their operation and it was by the book.
Alejandro was once a prosecutor in Mexico, until a drug lord killed his whole family. Now he’s working for the Columbians and the CIA because they’ve given him the chance to assassinate the guy who murdered his wife and daughter. In the film’s final act, the CIA smuggles Alejandro back into Mexico and gives him intel to help him track, kidnap and murder various members of the cartel, including one man we’ve been set up to like – a Mexican police officer who’s moving drugs for the cartel, probably so that they don’t kill him. When Alejandro finally makes his way to the drug lord’s home, he murders the guy’s whole family in front of him, completing his revenge.
In the movie’s final scenes, Alejandro returns to the USA and confronts Kate, who’s refused to sign the paperwork after learning his true mission. He threatens to kill her and make it look like a suicide if she doesn’t sign, and, when she can see that he’s serious, she agrees. As Alejandro walks away, Kate points her gun at him but can’t make herself pull the trigger. The last thing we see is Mexican families watching their children play soccer while gunshots are fired in the distance.
I will say something good about the plot of Sicario, and it’s this: the movie manages to have a lot of characters tell lies while still presenting the audience with a story that makes sense from everyone’s perspective. That’s not easy to do. It also takes advantage of our expectations to trick us in a fairly clever way – we’re so used to seeing characters get drafted into super special teams that they’re not qualified to be on that we don’t even question why Kate was chosen for the task force, even though we’re told several times that she doesn’t have the knowledge or experience to be there. There are definitely a lot of well-executed elements at play here – but there were still some things that bugged me as I was watching.
To start with, Kate Mercer is a worse version of Clarice Starling. The comparison with Silence of the Lambs is pretty hard to miss – Clarice was also a naive FBI agent, brought onto a special project because her lack of guile and lack of knowledge made her the perfect candidate. And she also developed a strange friendship with a murderer whom she later couldn’t bring herself to kill. The difference is that Clarice was the hero of Silence of the Lambs – the entire story is about how she overcomes her inexperience and finds the courage and determination to track down a serial killer, proving to herself that she’s become powerful enough to protect others. Kate just gets tricked by some people. Her main purpose in the story is to witness how great Alejandro is.
Even though most of Sicario is shown to us through Kate’s perspective, and she’s the character the audience is most invited to identify with, this is really Alejandro’s story – and it’s not so different from any other contemporary action movie. He’s a brooding, dark hero with a troubled past who’s become a hardened killer, and he looks really cool doing it. One of the most telling things is that the movie suddenly ditches Kate once it gets more exciting to watch Alejandro kill people. We follow him for quite a long time before returning to Kate, and even then, he “wins” that exchange in the same way he’s won every other exchange he’s involved in. He never messes anything up, he never wavers from his mission – he’s totally sure that he’s right about everything, and he always gets the upper hand, just like every other action hero ever.
The other knock against Kate as a character – besides that she’s only there to watch Alejandro be a dark, capable assassin – is that she’s ineffective in everything she does. She tries to take a moral stand against the CIA but Alejandro forces her to back out of it. She tries to get the task force to follow procedure, but Graver makes her feel stupid for doing it and she, again, backs off. The worst part is a sequence where she tries to hook up with a friend of a friend only to discover that that guy’s working for the Mexican cartel and only there to find out what she knows. The way she finds out is the stupidest part of the movie – I’ll spare you the details – but, once she finds out who he is, he overpowers her and she’s ultimately saved by Alejandro, who reveals that he was following her the whole time because they used her as bait to flush this guy out. Then, she thanks him for saving her life.
The movie is also kinder to Alejandro when he does something evil than it is to members of the drug cartel. The film opens with a scene where Kate’s team accidentally discovers a house full of the cartel’s victims, and we get lingering shots of their corpses, all with plastic bags over their heads. When the task force goes to Juarez, we also get lingering shots of mutilated bodies hung up on an overpass, and dumped on the street by the cartel. But, when Alejandro kills Fausto Alarcón’s family, we don’t see the bullets enter their bodies. When he tortures an informant secretly transported across the border, all we see is a grate on the floor.
The movie acts like it’s a big surprise that the CIA doesn’t care about anyone outside America, but, no matter what your feelings are about that in real life, it’s obvious to anyone who’s seen a film before that that has to be where this is going. The more interesting question is how Alejandro feels about Mexico, after everything that’s happened to him, but the film doesn’t interrogate that very much.
It’s also interesting that the two focal characters in this movie are a woman and a Latino man, but the movie doesn’t make very much of that, either. There’s a weird dynamic where Kate keeps getting shut down every time she tries to assert herself, and where Graver tries to bully her into keeping quiet – and there are moments of that that feel realistic in an uncomfortably gendered way, though it isn’t explored very deeply. Just like it would have been nice to hear more about what Alejandro thinks of Mexico, it would have been nice to look at the awkward gender dynamic a little more closely, too.
The only character that really doesn’t land is Kate’s partner from the FBI, Reggie. Because race is so important to this story, it bears mentioning that Reggie’s black, and that, if Kate is bad at accomplishing things, he’s even worse than she is. Again, it’s interesting that the dynamic is one where a white man keeps information from Kate and behaves dismissively toward her, and then Kate keeps information from Reggie and behaves dismissively toward him, but I’m not sure it’s happening on purpose, or that it’s there to offer any kind of commentary. The actual result, though, is that Reggie exists to give Kate someone to explain things to or withhold things from. He doesn’t contribute anything else except advice that she doesn’t listen to. There’s even a scene where they go have beers and he spends the whole time talking about her, and trying to give her advice about her love life. Who is Reggie other than being Kate’s tag-along? We’ll never know.
Taken all together, Sicario is a pretty standard action movie wrapped in a thin layer of social commentary on the drug war and US-Mexico relations. Once you brush away a few contemplative shots and a few scenes where characters wring their hands over moral ambiguity, this is straight-forwardly a story about a hitman who is awesome at killing people – a beast that you admire from afar. The story is told from the perspective of a woman who knew him and, because she was ignorant about what was going on at the time, that makes his story more suspenseful.
Sicario is part of that awkward genre of action movie that wants us to enjoy watching someone indiscriminately kill people, but feels obligated to point out that it’s wrong to indiscriminately kill people – or, if it’s not wrong, it’s complicated – it’s a grey area – it’s a sad, hard truth of the world we live in – look at him shoot that guy through another guy!
I’m still waiting for a better Emily Blunt-led detective movie than this.
Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV (both real and made up) on her blog.