Nearly ten years after its theatrical debut, Sicario is having a moment in the Netflix Top 10. Normally most movies that could be described, however tangentially, as political thrillers risk a short shelf life. But with the drugs and the U.S.-Mexico border a regular political talking point every year since the 2016 presidential election that closely followed this movie’s release, the film remains uncomfortably current, despite its Obama-years genesis.
Ten years of distance also highlights the lucky break that Sicario turned out to be one those movies that feels like an all-star production in retrospect, and not just because stars Emily Blunt, Josh Brolin, and Benicio del Toro remain cinema fixtures a decade later, or even because supporting players Daniel Kaluuya and Jon Bernthal have since gone on to greater fame. Director Denis Villeneuve made this movie before he became a geek fave with his Blade Runner sequel and Dune movies; cinematographer Roger Deakins shot this just before he finally won a pair of Oscars; and screenwriter Taylor Sheridan has since become a TV impresario with his Yellowstone universe (among other series). It’s the kind of movie that did well enough to inspire a sequel and picked up a couple of Oscar nominations, but now seems like it should have been a bigger hit.
Photo: Everett Collection
The film itself – a border-set thriller that’s often shot and scored more like a horror picture – follows Kate Macer (Blunt), an FBI agent roped into a task force spearheaded by CIA guy Matt Graver (Brolin) and assisted by a shadowy assassin (Del Toro). She eventually learns that she’s there entirely to address a technicality that disallows the CIA from going solo on operations outside the U.S. Even before that late-movie revelation, though, Kate suspects that she’s not actually been recruited for her law-enforcement expertise, because the operation resists traditional arrests and evidence-gathering at every turn. Graver and his men are there to exert control via chaos, not to actually combat drug abuse.
Kate initially sticks with the group in part because she wants justice for the ghastly scene she comes across at the opening of the film, where a raid on a cartel house in Arizona, seemingly empty but for the dozens of rotting corpses the agents find squirreled away inside the walls. The search is punctuated by an explosive booby trap; though the tone is entirely different, the trappings aren’t too far removed from a Saw movie. Multiple other scenes have horror shadings, from a raid through a cartel tunnel (with night-vision cinematography recalling something like a zombie video game) to Kate’s hook-up with a local cop who turns out to be dirty (shades of a stalker thriller).
This mood comes courtesy of the Oscar-nominated Deakins cinematography (he would finally win his first one for his next Villeneuve film, Blade Runner 2049), which uses a few familiar tones in the depiction of Mexico by outsiders – the cranked white glare, the desert browns – but largely departs from the Traffic orthodoxy established 15 years earlier, namely that the country is yellow-filtered and grainy, with plenty of dust and sunglasses glint. Deakins uses a sharper, starker look for the daylight action scenes, and dusky, shadowy images for the nighttime ones. Notably, yellowish lighting comes into play more in scenes of interrogation, where the “good” guys are pressing captives for information, imposing their will on Mexican people.
It’s hard to say whether Villeneuve and Deakins are consciously critiquing what had, by that point, become condescending visual clichés. Sicario, in general, occupies an uneasy and fascinating space between nasty genre pulp and genuine critique. Is Kate stubbornly naïve about how to address cartel-related cases, or is Matt so smugly convinced of the effectiveness of restoring U.S.-friendlier cartel “order” that he’s indulging a forever war at the behest of the state? Within that ambiguity, there’s more: Is the movie genuinely ambivalent about these issues or noncommittally both-sides-ing to enhance its dark thrills? Whatever balance it strikes, its 2018 sequel Sicario: Day of the Soldado (which loses Blunt, Villenueve, and Deakins, among other vital ingredients) tips further into glorification, seemingly less out of any real political conviction than a misguided desire to go hard as a thriller.
That’s certain what Sicario does, and there’s something pointed and uneasy about the way its climax departs from Kate and Matt entirely, following Del Toro’s assassin on a vengeful mission with a bloody, impossible-to-justify outcome. Though some could probably still read the sequence as acceptable collateral damage, it plays especially scary in the second Trump era, where the twin boogeymen of drugs and immigrants are intertwined in political rhetoric and used to justify, well, just about anything – not policies that are proven to lower crime or help victims of the drug trade, but provide some kind of vengeful release, no matter how ugly. Villeneuve is too clinical to push more emotional buttons, and maybe ultimately too much of a showman to deliver anything more than a visceral chill. But to his credit, he made a crime thriller whose discomfort doesn’t diminish with its rewatchability.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.