Sicario

Sicario follows FBI agent Kate Macer as she joins a team of Delta Force operators who are attempting to hunt down the people in charge of a Mexican drug cartels. Led by an adviser for the Department of Justice, Matt Graver, they begin operations in Mexico in order to draw the leader of the cartel back into Mexico. No more than about half an hour or so into Sicario we find our main characters on a mission to retrieve someone from a Mexican prison and transport them back to America. Everything has gone smoothly picking him up, but on the way back to the border they notice someone following the convoy in order to report on their movements, and not long after they find out that the border crossing is backed up with traffic. Sitting in the traffic jam, they slowly notice cartel members in other cars, but the voice in their ears tell them that they can't engage until they are engaged - so they sit in their cars, waiting for the cartel to make the first move before an intense burst of gunfire and violence over a matter of seconds concludes the confrontation. It's the kind of scene that leaves you breathless, a master class in building tension that makes you think 'Wow. Nothing this film can do from now on can top that'.

Kate acts as our sole viewpoint throughout the majority of Sicario and like Kate, we end up unsure about why things are happening or what might happen next, but the mystery Sicario tries to create isn't intriguing enough to serve as a narrative and the eventual reveal is so inconsequential that I don't know why Sicario bothered to hide it from the audience in the first place.

Additionally (and I'm going to preface this by saying that it might just be me that feels this way), Kate as a character doesn't really have an effect on the way the film progresses, and that bores me. She has no agency within the story, partly due to the aforementioned way that she kind of has no idea what is going on throughout, but also because of the way that at the end of the day she is simply being used by the team for jurisdiction rights. The way that Sicario progresses is through things happening to her rather than her making things happen, and if I'm being honest I expected more from a film with Emily Blunt - with or without her, almost all of Sicario would have happened the way it did, to the point where it begins to feel like Sicario should have chosen a different main character.

The film is otherwise incredibly well made, with stellar performances from the entire cast, particularly Benicio Del Toro, gorgeous cinematography courtesy of Roger Deakins, and a handful of intense scenes. Director Villeneueve is worth keeping an eye on, someone who manages to blur the line between art house cinema styles and mainstream appeal incredibly effectively, and I'm looking forward to seeing what he does next. I wouldn't recommend Sicario to everyone but I enjoyed it for what it was.