Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario opens on a raid in Chandler, Arizona that turns into a body count. FBI special agents Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) and Reggie Wayne (Daniel Kaluuya) breach a Sonora Cartel safe house and find dozens of decaying corpses sealed inside the walls. Outside, a booby trap kills two police officers. That is the first fifteen minutes, and it sets the terms: this is a film about what the work costs the people who do it.
Trailer, via Lionsgate Movies.
A Task Force That Answers to No One
Kate is recruited into a joint task force run by Matt Graver (Josh Brolin), a CIA/SAD officer who explains almost nothing, and Alejandro Gillick (Benicio del Toro), a Mexican prosecutor turned CIA-trained assassin. The stated mission is to apprehend Sonoran lieutenant Manuel Díaz, hiding in the United States. The team includes Delta Force operators, Deputy US Marshals and CIA personnel. Kate is not told why she was chosen.
Sheridan wrote the script as his screenwriting debut, and it is a lean piece of construction. The task force crosses the El Paso–Juárez border to extradite Díaz’s brother, Guillermo. Cartel hitmen ambush them. The Americans kill them fast. Kate shoots a Federal Police officer in self-defense and is left visibly horrified. Alejandro tortures Guillermo and learns the cartel runs drugs through a tunnel near Nogales, Sonora.
| Release | Date |
|---|---|
| Cannes Film Festival competition | 2015 |
| Limited U.S. release | September 18, 2015 |
| Nationwide U.S. release | October 2, 2015 |
| Sequel: Sicario: Day of the Soldado | June 29, 2018 |
The Real Mission, and the Bank
Kate confronts Matt, who admits the actual objective: disrupt Díaz’s drug operations so he leads them to his boss, drug lord Fausto Alarcón. She asks Reggie to stay close. The task force raids a bank laundering Díaz’s money. Kate and Reggie find financial evidence and want to file a lawsuit against Díaz. They are ordered to stand down so the operation is not jeopardized. The film does not say what became of the evidence or whether any filing followed.
At a bar, Reggie introduces Kate to Ted (Jon Bernthal), a Phoenix Police officer. They become intimate at her apartment. She realizes Ted is working with the cartel. He begins to strangle her. Alejandro appears and subdues him.
The cast around Blunt is doing precise work. Del Toro plays Alejandro as a man with no wasted motion. Brolin plays Matt as a man who has already decided what he is willing to do. Victor Garber, Jeffrey Donovan, Raoul Max Trujillo, Julio Cesar Cedillo and Maximiliano Hernández fill out the edges. The tagline — “The border is just another line to cross” — is the whole argument in seven words.
What the Awards Noticed
Sicario competed for the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2015. It drew praise for its cast, writing, direction, musical score and cinematography. The 88th Academy Awards nominated it for Best Cinematography, Best Original Score and Best Sound Editing. BAFTA nominations followed for Best Supporting Actor, Best Cinematography and Best Film Music.
It is the first installment of Sheridan’s American Frontier Trilogy, ahead of Hell or High Water and Wind River. A sequel, Sicario: Day of the Soldado, was directed by Stefano Sollima. A third film, Sicario: Capos, is in development.
| Film | Director | Release | Awards recognition |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sicario | Denis Villeneuve | 2015 | 3 Oscar nominations; 3 BAFTA nominations |
| Sicario: Day of the Soldado | Stefano Sollima | June 29, 2018 | — |
| Sicario: Capos | — | In development | — |
What Sicario Gets Right
The film’s real subject is not the cartel. It is Kate, and what happens to a principled agent inside a machine that does not share her principles. Villeneuve and Sheridan never let her win an argument, and they never let her leave. Every escalation — the corpses in the walls, the border ambush, the bank raid, Ted’s hands around her throat — narrows her options until the only move left is to keep going.
The runtime is 122 minutes, and it does not sag. The score and the cinematography carry tension the dialogue refuses to state outright, which is why the film’s best scenes are the quiet ones: Kate in a briefing room being told nothing, Kate in a car watching a foreign city slide past.
The one soft spot is the plot mechanics around Díaz. The film treats the tunnel, the bank and the extradition as a chain of errands, and the middle stretch leans on Kate asking questions the audience already knows the answers to. It is a small drag in an otherwise controlled piece of work.
Sicario is a crime thriller that trusts its audience to sit in discomfort without a release valve. It earned that trust. 8.2 of 10.
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