Sicario: Day of the Soldado Blu-ray Review
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, October 10, 2018
There's a good reason why there wasn't a
Citizen Kane 2, not the least of which is that Charles Foster Kane is of course deceased as the film
begins (oops — forgot a spoiler alert). Some films are so
sui generis that they themselves don't seem to require any "offspring", so to
speak. Now,
Sicario, for all of its visceral intensity and
unsettling depictions of the smarmy underbelly of international drug trafficking, is probably not in the same league as Orson Welles' immortal
masterpiece, but the nagging question may still remain as to why a sequel was deemed necessary. That question may seem even more pressing
when the first part of
Sicario: Day of the Soldado arguably plays more like a sibling rather than a sequel, in this case to terrorist themed
shows like
Homeland. What's perhaps most unsettling from a structural
standpoint is screenwriter Taylor Sheridan's decision
not to include a "vicarious audience" character like the first
Sicario's Kate Macer
(played by Emily Blunt), as is actually addressed overtly in one of the supplements included on this release. That tends to make the story unfold
from an "outsider"'s perspective, something that perhaps inevitably leads to a bit of distancing. All of this said,
Sicario: Day of the Soldado
is a good deal better than it probably has any right to be, with some fine performances from returning cast members Josh Brolin as Matt Graver,
Benicio del Toro as Alejandro Gillick and Jeffrey Donovan as Steve Forsing.
In fact for the first half hour or so, some might be hard pressed to delineate what this film has to do with the first
Sicario, despite an early
text crawl offering some data points about the porous United States - Mexico border, and the human trafficking that takes place across that
border.
The film opens with what looks like a routine border patrol operation, with a bunch of helicopters and ground troops rounding up a bunch of illegal
immigrants. But one guy takes off from the group and sets off an explosion in a suicide bombin, and later prayer rugs are found at the location.
Another even more horrifying incident is then shown where a bunch of Muslim men walk into a typical looking store and set off
several
explosions via suicide bombs again, all of this with nary a word about illicit drug dealing.
When another vignette documents the capture of a suspect in Somalia by a group of US black ops troops,
Sicario: Day of the Soldado
certainly seems to be trafficking itself in something other than the content of the first film. But as soon as Matt Graver (Josh Brolin) walks in to
interrogate the Somalian captive, things start to fall into place, with the interesting tidbit that some of the terrorists in the United States didn't fly
there, and so must have traveled by ship, something that, considering they were evidently Yemeni, required the tacit approval of the by now
infamous Somali "pirates" who act as "border patrols" of a sort themselves in the waters off of their country.
However, the illicit drug trade does of course begin to enter the picture, though the connection between drug cartels and (another kind of) terrorist
is arguably not that well linked or contextualized in Sheridan's screenplay. With those in power, including Secretary of Defense James Riley
(Matthew Modine), wanting to thwart any further influx of terrorists across the border, and with the assumption made that the drug cartels are
complicit in getting the terrorists across the border, Garver and his team decide to manufacture a drug war, pitting cartel against cartel. It's not
exactly a new premise for a film dealing with gangsters and the underworld, and it's perhaps unavoidable that parts of
Sicario: Day of the
Soldado come off as derivative, even if several sequences admittedly provide pretty significant jolts of adrenaline.
While there are some fantastically effective moments in
Sicario: Day of the Soldado, including an urban hit of a Mexican mobster
orchestrated by Alejandro Gillick (Benicio del Toro), unfortunately Sheridan tends to fray some of his energy by getting into what might be termed
"the next generation" with regard to a couple of major supporting characters. One of these is Isabel Reyes (Isabel Moner), the daughter of a cartel
head who is "renditioned" herself in a scheme that fingers a rival gang for the kidnapping in order to foment violence between the groups. The
other "youngster" is a Miguel Hernandez (Elijah Rodriguez), whose schooling in the ways of the cartel provides what is arguably the closest
"insider" character in this film, even if the point of view this time is decidedly anti-heroic. There are interweavings of the Isabel and Miguel stories,
but the overall arc of
Sicario: Day of the Soldado seems somewhat more random than in the first film, and there are both glaring lapses
of logic (why for instance does Gillick remove his facemask right before he executes a mobster, especially when he's out in broad daylight and the
whole operation is supposed to implicate a rival gang?), as well as curiously underdeveloped situations that never really exploit tensions as much
as in the first film (the "escape" of Isabel is probably the most notable example).
What may chafe at the sensibilities of some fans of the first film is how generic so much of
Sicario: Day of the Soldado can seem. It's
like
Sheridan decided to shear his characters of some of their most distinctive traits, in order to provide an easier template to build a series out of. The
performances throughout this follow up are routinely quite compelling, and some of the individual scenes crackle with something amounting to the
same energy levels as in
Sicario, but there are arguably too many subplots for the film's own good, something that ultimately leads to a
number of unnecessary detours before things are properly set up for what seems like an inevitable third
Sicario film.
Note: My colleague Brian Orndorf was considerably less impressed with
Sicario: Day of the Soldado than I was. You can read
Brian's thoughts on the film
here.
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