Checked out Sicario: Day of the Soldado at the theater over the weekend. This is the sequel to Sicaro, a kind of bleak noire film set on the US/Mexico border… and seeing the new flick (also set on the border) was a little awkward given the immigration protests that went on this weekend.
Sicario came out two or three years ago and followed Emily Blunt as a novice (and audience viewpoint character) stepping unwittingly into a border conflict between the cartels and rogue/black-ops CIA agents. The movie was more theme and mood than it was story… it set us into this world where nobody was playing nice and let us experience the darkness. It was a film noire set during high noon and one of the most suspenseful, skin-crawling films out there.
This sequel brings back the two rogue agents played by Josh Brolin and Benicio Del Toro and drops the naive audience viewpoint character. We watch these new events from the perspective of the shady anti-heroes so the tone and feel of the movie is very different. It tries hard to be as suspenseful as the first and sometimes approaches those levels but never gets there. They have changed directors and you can tell… not that the new guy is bad, it’s just that the previous film’s director was better.
The new film is much more story-driven and more Hollywood than before. Oddly, I think the plot is roughly the same… the shady good guys are on a mission to destabilize the drug cartels. Pretty sure they did that last movie. This time though the heroes plan to kidnap the daughter one of cartel kingpin and lay the blame on another cartel. But the Mexican federales double-cross them and now Del Toro’s character is on the run with Isabela Moner (the girl from the last Transformers movie).
Overall, this is a pretty good sequel to a better film. It still simmers in the bleak, film noire world they set up previously. It’s well acted but without a “good” character like Blunt, you have to be ok with these anti-heroes. It helps that Brolin and Del Toro are such pros. Overall, a good solid film.
Score: 81