Sicario is set against the United States’ never-ending “war on drugs,” particularly as it is waged around the U.S.-Mexico border. The film opens with Kate Macer (Emily Blunt), a DEA agent who specializes in hostage recovery, leading a heavily armed SWAT team into a seemingly benign suburban home in the desert outside of Phoenix where they think they will find someone who has been kidnapped by a drug kingpin. Instead, they find a house of horrors where dozens of dead bodies are hidden in the walls. Kate’s work draws the attention of Matt Graver (Josh Brolin), a CIA agent who has been tasked with tracking down a notorious Mexican drug lord who lives in Phoenix and manages to hide all his illegal activities beneath a surface veneer of legitimacy. Graver recruits Kate to work with him and his team, which also includes Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro), a mysterious consultant who is from South America and used to work as a special prosecutor in Mexico. Kate is immediately suspicious of Alejandro’s role in the team, as she recognizes that he does not fit into any of the legally binding categories of law enforcement and is therefore operating in his own sphere, which conflicts with her rules-oriented, by-the-book mentality.

As the narrative progresses, we are taken deeper and deeper into the war between law enforcement and the drug cartels, which Villeneuve stages in a series of bravura setpieces that cast Kate as the audience surrogate, witnessing for the first time the apparently necessary, but not necessarily legal, actions that invariably define such warfare. Kate’s increasing moral outrage about what she sees is matched only by her impotence to do anything about it. Although initially presented as a strong, willful character who is fully in command of her work, Sicario’s primary trajectory is a kind of devolution that finds her view of the proper means of law enforcement being steadily eroded by the recognition that legalities and proper procedure are regularly cast aside in pursuit of the bad guys.

And bad guys they are. The film makes no bones about the ruthless tactics of the drug cartels, beginning with the Phoenix house of horrors, followed by a trip south of the border into Juarez that finds decapitated bodies hanging from the highway overpasses and cars full of tattooed thugs ready to do battle in the middle of broad daylight. The brutality is not just on the wrong side of the law, though, and it is the film’s depictions of the U.S. agents’ willingness to use lethal force and brutal interrogation tactics without qualms or even a hint of moral reflection that makes the film so disturbing. The film doesn’t let us off the hook by making easy distinctions between “good” and “bad” violence; it’s all unsettling, as it should be. Sicario is an intensely violent film, although Villeneuve often leaves the most gruesome bloodshed off-screen, allowing us to hear the horrors without seeing them, which encourages us to imagine the worst.

Propelled by a thumping musical score by Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson (who also scored Prisoners) and burnished cinematography by veteran Roger Deakins, Sicario grabs you from the opening scene and rarely lets up. There are certainly moments of respite, particularly in scenes involving Kate when she is off the job as she attempts to maintain a sense of humanity, but otherwise the narrative has a propulsive force that rarely lets up. If there is a misstep, it is the inclusion of a subplot involving a Mexican police officer named Rafael (Raoul Trujillo) whose story, which mostly involves interactions with his wife and his young son, is interspersed throughout the larger narrative. There is ultimately a point to his inclusion, and one that is not without emotional and philosophical resonance, but the manner in which it is included feels a bit heavy-handed and awkward.

That misstep aside, Sicario, like Prisoners, is a powerful experience in the way it forces us into a violent confrontation with our own ethical worldview, challenging any tidy notions of right and wrong. It is set against a specific political backdrop, but Villeneuve is clearly interested in the broader scope of human experience; the title of the film, which is explained in an opening title card, refers to Jewish assassins who fought against the Roman Empire in the first century, thus placing the film’s violence on a much larger historical continuum (in other words, there’s nothing new under the sun, but we still have to keep fighting for our souls). While Kate is our moral surrogate, Alejandro reflects the sense of Old Testament justice we don’t admit to in polite company, but revel in nonetheless. As Alejandro’s role in the drug wars is slowly revealed, he begins to take center stage, and the last quarter of the film focuses solely on him as he infiltrates the highest levels of the cartel with a singular mission, the “eye for an eye” purpose of which is both horrifying and, in its own twisted way, justified.

Nobody is spared in Sicario—physically or morally—and the film’s final moments supply a chilling coda suggesting that everything may have very well been for naught. In a purely superficial sense, the CIA’s goals in the film are fulfilled and bad guys are taken down, but the echoing sound of gunshots in the last few frames remind us that everything we saw, however seemingly monumental, was but one small battle in a much, much larger war.

Copyright ©2015 James Kendrick

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