Susan Granger’s review of “Sicario” (Lionsgate)
Along the lawless border between the United States and Mexico, drug cartels rule and “sicario” means hitman. That’s where French-Canadian director Denis Villenueve focuses in this grim, grisly thriller.
After idealistic FBI field agent, Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) and her SWAT-team partner, Reggie (Daniel Kaluuya), discover a stash of rotting corpses stashed behind a drywall in an Arizona subdivision, she’s recruited by a shadowy government task force, headed by scruffy, sandal-clad Matt Graver (Josh Brolin).
The covert black-ops squad is led by a burly, vengeful Colombian ‘consultant,’ Alejandro (Benicio del Toro), who cryptically tells Kate as she dons her Kevlar vest: “Nothing will make sense to your American ears, and you will doubt everything we do.”
First on the agenda is an unorthodox trip over the Rio Grande and through the dry, cactus-filled Chihuahua Desert to Juarez to retrieve a prisoner to make him squeal on the Sonora cartel, leading to the capture of businessman Manuel Diaz (Bernardo Saracino) in order to flush out the kingpin, Fausto Alarcon (Julio Cesar Cedillo).
Meanwhile, there’s a Spanish-captioned sub-plot involving a young Mexican policeman (Maximiliano Hernandez), his dutiful wife and his soccer-loving son.
Like Jessica Chastain in “Zero Dark Thirty,” unflappable Emily Blunt, as by-the-book Kate, is trying to make sense of the real purpose of their mission. As a result, she doesn’t know whom to trust. And beneath the moral chaos lies the question: does the end justify the means?
Working from a timely script by Texas-native Taylor Sheridan (“Sons of Anarchy”), Denis Villenueve (“Polytechnique,” ”Incendies,” “Prisoners”) evokes memories of Steven Soderbergh’s Oscar-winning “Traffic” (2000), utilizing the same subject matter in a far more sinister context, superbly photographed by Roger Deakins, expertly edited by Joe Walker and subtly scored by Johan Johannsson.
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Sicario” is a savage 7 – delivering enough sheer brutality and suspense to maintain two hours of dread-filled anxiety.
