By Muhammad Muzammal – Arts and Entertainment Assistant Editor
Denis Villeneuve’s “Sicario” is a relentlessly gripping masterwork of cinematic tension-building. From its opening set piece, Villenueve creates his most suspenseful film yet, and gets a trio of outstanding performances from Emily Blunt, Josh Brolin and Benicio Del Toro.
When the film opens, we see the following words etched on the screen, which I have paraphrased, followed by pulsating, drumming music:
“Zealots who killed Romans in old Jerusalem were referred to as Sicario. We refer to them today as hitmen.”
It is with this sense of perspectivism that “Sicario” succeeds on a grand, almost operatic level.
As the film opens on an explosion outside of a building whose walls are filled with cadavers, we see the disturbed reaction of Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) after she leads a group of FBI agents inside a drug lab of a major drug lord, Manuel Diaz (Bernardo P. Saracino). Macer shakes and vomits, showing the effects of her alarming discovery of the soulless cadavers.
Macer’s work in the kidnapping department lands her a job in a narcotics task force, set up to take down Diaz and his empire that branches out to Mexico. As Macer will resentfully observe, there is more to the war on drugs than the straight divide between America and other nations.
Macer is recruited by Matt Graver (Josh Brolin), Colonel Kilgore to Del Toro’s Alejandro, who plays middleman between the FBI narcotic department and South American drug groups.
As the film progresses, Macer’s whole worldview is trumped by both Alejandro and Graver, whose views on the drug war certainly differ from that of Macer’s.
This is readily seen when Macer is caught in the middle of a shootout at the Mexican border, where Alejandro leads the task force into killing a group of armed Mexicans.
Out of instinct, Macer kills an armed individual who creeps on the task force members. The effects of this act is damaging to Macer as she screams at Graver shortly after the fact.
However, Graver and Alejandro remain calm and collective, treating the incident as an everyday occurrence, subtext to how they see death as a step towards obtaining Diaz.
One of the great things about Villenueve’s film is how it incorporates the personal, lonely, divorced life of Mercer with her risky, dangerous career. In a sequence where Mercer is intimate with another man for the first time in years, the evening doesn’t go as expected and the man is not who we expect him to be.
Villenueve, as he was in “Prisoners,” “Enemy” and “Incendies,” is always one step ahead of his audience and just when you taste a sense of calmness, he reverts you back to the chaos of the world, which is the view of the film itself.
By incorporating the pulsing, intense score of Johannes Johannesburg and the bleak-yet-beautiful cinematography of the always-reliable Roger Deakins, Villenueve creates a mood piece that is both enthralling and disturbing.
Compare the modern-day view of American foreign policy of “Sicario” to that of Spielberg’s “Bridge of Spies.” In both films, an American citizen is placed in an diplomatic position to make an undiplomatic choice. While the latter is a much more optimistic film, “Sicario” is darker and sinister -– and for good reason.
Sicario reminds us of the horrors of the drug trade at the U.S. border and more so, the pains that it has on an American trying to do things the “American” way.
“Bridge of Spies” invites this way of action. “Sicario” repels it.