Stefano Sollima’s Sicario: Day of the Soldado opens with a suicide bombing in a Kansas City grocery store. Fifteen people die. The U.S. government responds by handing CIA officer Matt Graver a mandate to hit the Mexican drug cartels it suspects of smuggling the attackers across the border.
That premise is a hard turn from 2015’s Sicario, and it is the first sign that Taylor Sheridan’s script has traded the original’s slow dread for something blunter. The sequel is bigger, louder and less patient. It is also, for long stretches, very good at being those things.
Trailer, via Sony Pictures Entertainment.
Benicio del Toro and Josh Brolin return to the border
Benicio del Toro is back as Alejandro Gillick. Josh Brolin returns as Matt Graver. Jeffrey Donovan and Raoul Trujillo also reprise their roles from the first film. Isabela Merced, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo and Catherine Keener join the cast.
The tagline promises a split: “Some missions need a hitman…others need a soldier.” Soldado spends its runtime trying to prove both men are the same thing, and the movie is most alive when it stops arguing and just watches them work.
Runtime is 122 minutes. The film is an action crime thriller, and it wears all three labels without much interest in hiding behind any of them.
A false flag operation built on a kidnapping
Graver and the Department of Defense settle on a plan: start a war between the major cartels. Graver recruits Gillick for the mission and meets private military company boss Andy Wheeldon to procure mercenaries, helicopters and encrypted communication equipment, so the U.S. keeps plausible deniability while it works.
Gillick assassinates a high-profile lawyer for the Matamoros cartel in Mexico City. Graver and his team kidnap Isabel Reyes, the daughter of Carlos Reyes, the kingpin of the Sonoran cartel and a rival of Matamoros. It is a false flag operation.
The team takes Isabel to a safe house in Texas and stages a DEA raid, pretending to rescue her from the Matamoros cartel. She is moved to an American military base while the team arranges her return to Mexico. The plan is to leave her in a Mexican Federal Police depot inside territory held by her father’s rivals, to push the cartels further toward open conflict.
The ambush that turns the mission
They cross into Mexico. The corrupt police escort turns on them and attacks the American Humvees. In the firefight, Graver and his team kill 25 Mexican policemen to escape.
Those dead policemen become mainstream news. The operation that was designed to stay invisible is now the story.
Isabel works out that Graver’s team may have been behind her abduction. She runs into the desert. Gillick goes after her alone while the rest of the team returns.
That decision — the hitman walking away from the mission to chase a girl he helped kidnap — is where Sicario: Day of the Soldado finally locates a pulse. Everything before it is machinery.
What Sollima gets right
Sollima inherited a franchise built on atmosphere, and he does not try to out-style what came before. He stages the ambush with clean geography, and he lets del Toro carry the back half on stillness rather than dialogue.
Del Toro is the reason to watch. His Gillick has always been a man doing state violence for private reasons, and Soldado makes that literal. The film is least interesting when it explains him and most convincing when it lets him stand in a room and decide something.
Brolin gets less to do. Graver is a handler here, and the script keeps handing him logistics. Keener’s Cynthia Foards and Matthew Modine’s Secretary of Defense James Riley exist mostly to authorize things.
A sequel that loses the first film’s restraint
The 2015 Sicario was about an operative discovering that the war on drugs had already been lost and that she was being used as cover for it. Soldado drops that frame. The outsider’s view that made the first film’s violence land is gone.
What replaces it is a plot about provoking cartels into fighting each other. Sheridan’s script is structured as a series of escalations: bombing, assassination, kidnapping, staged rescue, ambush, 25 dead police. Each beat is bigger than the last. Fewer of them mean anything.
The film also carries a real loss. It is dedicated to the memory of Jóhann Jóhannsson, the composer of the first film, who died four months before this one came out. His absence is felt in the score, which pushes where the original’s held back.
Isabela Merced holds the center
Isabela Merced plays Isabel Reyes, and the film depends on her more than its marketing suggests. She is not a hostage to be recovered. She is a teenager who figures out, correctly, that the people who took her are the people who are supposed to be protecting her.
Merced plays that realization without melodrama. When Isabel runs into the desert, it reads as the only sane response available to her, which is more than the script earns.
The supporting cast is thin by design. Elijah Rodriguez appears as Miguel Hernandez, David Castañeda as Hector, Howard Ferguson Jr. as Troy, Jacqueline Torres as Blandina. Shea Whigham and Manuel Garcia-Rulfo fill out the operation.
The verdict on Sicario: Day of the Soldado
Sicario: Day of the Soldado was released in the United States and Canada on June 29, 2018, by Sony Pictures Releasing. Lionsgate handled international distribution, excluding South Africa, Latin America and Spain, where Sony distributed.
It is a competent, well-acted, frequently hollow sequel. The first Sicario asked whether the ends justify the means and refused to answer. Soldado asks the same question and answers it in the first twenty minutes, then spends 100 more minutes restating the answer with bigger explosions.
The kidnapping of Isabel is the film’s best idea and its most wasted one. A story about a government using a child as a lever to start a cartel war is a real story, and Soldado keeps backing away from it to stage another firefight.
What remains is del Toro. He is enough to make the film worth the 122 minutes, and not enough to make it matter the way the first one did. The tagline says some missions need a hitman and others need a soldier. Soldado never decides which film it wants to be, and that indecision is the whole problem.
A sequel, Sicario: Capos, is in development. On this evidence, the franchise has not yet found a reason to continue beyond the fact that it can.
The numbers behind the release
- Title: Sicario: Day of the Soldado (also known as Sicario 2: Soldado or Soldado)
- Release: June 29, 2018, in the U.S. and Canada
- Distributor: Sony Pictures Releasing (U.S./Canada); Lionsgate internationally, excluding South Africa, Latin America and Spain
- Director: Stefano Sollima
- Writer: Taylor Sheridan
- Runtime: 122 minutes
- Genre: Action, Crime, Thriller
- Cast: Benicio del Toro, Josh Brolin, Isabela Merced, Jeffrey Donovan, Catherine Keener, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Matthew Modine, Shea Whigham
- Score: 6.1 of 10
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