Mark Reviews Movies: SICARIO: DAY OF THE SOLDADO

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 28, 2018

The wars with and between the Mexican drug cartels escalate in Sicario: Day of the Soldado, and so, too, do the tactics used in those battles. This mostly unnecessary sequel continues the tale of both prosecutor-turned-hitman Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro), who takes little joy but sees full necessity in killing those who would destroy lives, and U.S. government spook Matt Graver (Josh Brolin), who seems to take sick pleasure in orchestrating violence against the same sorts of people.

Most will recall that the central dynamic of the original film was between these amoral actors in a government-financed-and-approved war against the cartels and an FBI agent, played by Emily Blunt, who mostly agreed with the mission of taking down the cartels but who, understandably, couldn't stomach the means to those ends. Sicario lived in that middle ground with Blunt's character—seeing the horrors of what the illegal drug industry could do but openly questioning if more killing, more government authority, and more devastated people really was the correct answer to the problem. She was the moral backbone within the twisted, symbiotic relationship between the drug dealers and those tasked to stop them.

There's no such character in the sequel, leaving us only with the horror, the violence, and the moral morass of this problem. For the remaining characters, the only answer is more horror, more violence, and a stronger sense of imposing the authoritarian will of the government against its enemies. It's an ugly vision of the modern "war on drugs," complicated by matters of migration, terrorism, and the administration of an unseen President of the United States, who has a hardline attitude toward and approach to all of these issues.

The story begins with migrants crossing the border from Mexico into the U.S., where one man detonates an explosive device in his bag. Elsewhere, four suicide bombers attack a grocery store (With the attack apparently being finished, a woman tries to exit the store with a small child in tow, and the movie lingers on the standoff with a cruel sense of creating tension). Graver enters the retaliation against the attacks by interrogating a Somali pirate. Believing that the man has information about the people behind the attack, Graver orders an airstrike on one of the captive's brothers—threatening to do it over and over again.

Since at least one of the attackers crossed the U.S. border with Mexico with the unwitting aid of a cartel, the President has declared that drug cartels are terrorist organizations. The Secretary of Defense (played by Matthew Modine) and Graver's superior Cynthia Foards (Catherine Keener) give him the green light to wage a war of subterfuge against the cartels, setting them against each other. He enlists the aid of Alejandro, the freelance assassin who's happy to get revenge on the cartel leader who ordered the murders of his wife and daughter.

There are no good guys here. There aren't even people who question the wisdom, the morality, the ethics, or even the efficacy of this plan. Screenwriter Taylor Sheridan, returning to script-writing duties from the first film, doesn't offer an entryway into this now global and far more ruthless world of warring with the drug cartels. Our protagonists this time were the shadowy, untrustworthy puppeteers of chaos in the original film, and apart from taking control of the foreground, they haven't changed much in this sequel.

Graves is still an amoral man with no qualms about his methods. Alejandro enters, apparently having more or less retired in Colombia, with the weight of those climactic moments near the end of the first film in our mind—when he killed anyone and everyone, including two children, who stood between him and the man who murdered his family. He's back at it again here, killing a cartel attorney in broad daylight on the streets of Mexico City and, with the aid of Graves' team, abducting Isabel Reyes (Isabela Moner), the teenage daughter of the cartel head who ordered Alejandro's family to be killed.

A strange and possibly intriguing shift does eventually occur, as the plan to frame a rival cartel for the girl's kidnapping suddenly falls apart. Our protagonists are separated, leaving Graves to deal with the political fallout of potentially starting a war with the Mexican government and Alejandro with Isabel, who is no longer an asset to the U.S. government but a witness and, hence, a liability. The man seeking vengeance finds himself in the position of a most unlikely protector. If we buy into the character's complete turnaround (which is a bit of a hard sell, considering the last time we met him), there's a pretty stinging indictment of this system, in which the only hero is a professional killer who at least possesses his own standard of right and wrong.

The director this time is Stefano Sollima, who shows an adept method of establishing the story's various political games, as well as violent standoffs, and seeing them through to their disastrous ends. What's missing from Sicario: Day of the Soldado is a sense of any real moral certainty (A subplot showing how a seemingly innocent kid becomes involved in a cartel's dealings exists to confirm the worst of people). If the first film was cynical about the methods of fighting this battle, the sequel is nihilistic to the point of apathy.

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