Every age has its heart of darkness. One place, in the grip of an insane mindset, where the unthinkable is not only thought but acted upon, and where the existing degrees of violence seem already so high as to be unraisable, until they are raised, over and over again, into realms of savagery that are, here we go again… unthinkable, until they are not. Isis, Auschwitz, My Lai, King Leopold’s Congo…
Sicario dives into another such zone of death: the stricken Mexico of the drug cartels, where freeway overpasses are festooned with mutilated corpses and violence is a lingua franca for competing drug lords. If you don’t speak that language, stay home. And what happens on one side of the law, and the border, can infect what goes on on the other, as Phoenix FBI agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) learns when she is invited to join an ultra-secret US taskforce bent on taking down the Sonora cartel. Asked to volunteer by Matt Graver (Josh Brolin), she is kept largely in the dark. Is he DEA, operating illegally outside US borders? Or CIA, doing likewise inside them? He says Department of Defense, and he has artillery, air power and army bases at his disposal. The destination for their first assignment is “around El Paso” but turns out to be Ciudad Juárez, El Paso’s evil twin city across the border fence, where the gunfire never stops.
Sicario’s first hour, opening with the discovery of 42 shrink-wrapped corpses in a cartel safe-house, conveys a nerve-wracking sense of being in deeply over one’s head. Blunt’s every new move crosses a legal or ethical line. When she protests, she’s told sharply, “The boundaries have been moved. Are we clear?” Clear is the last thing she is. That becomes plain during an exceptionally bloody skirmish between Brolin’s team and cartel assassins at the Mexican border early on, a private war between two armies outside the law.
Sicario’s territory is by now well trodden: we’ve been here before in No Country For Old Men and its gabbier, more pretentious half-sister The Counselor (both from Cormac McCarthy’s pen), in Breaking Bad, in Oliver Stone’s Savages, FX’s The Bridge, and Netflix’s Narcos. Sicario can stand tall in this company, being hugely suspenseful and disturbing – an immensely satisfying drama. Casting a woman in the lead –Blunt commands the screen – is transformative, too, sharpening every moral conflict and deepening the sense of danger we feel. Each superbly staged violent set-piece is succeeded by another unfaceable moral dilemma, while each surprise revelation nastily reconfigures our understanding of what’s gone before. Denis Villeneuve has created a plausibly horrifying moral wasteland in which the “good” team slowly absorbs the methods and mindset of the bad, and made a fiercely intelligent and entertaining movie around it.
