Sicario: Day of the Soldado (2018)

Sicario has grown on me since I first saw it a couple years ago. It is even more timely now than it was then, casting moral ambiguity onto the War on Drugs and its fallout around the U.S.-Mexico border. With its beautiful yet bleak composition from director Denis Villeneuve and cinematographer/legend Roger Deakins and excellent performances from Emily Blunt, Benicio del Toro, and Josh Brolin, that film asks a lot of questions about grey areas and, due to its construction, lets each individual audience member answer them.

That’s the biggest difference between that film and its sequel, Sicario: Day of the Soldado: while in some respects it does keep pace with its predecessor, its treatment of its events’ moral standing leaves a lot to be desired. We view the actions of Alejandro Gillick (del Toro) and Matt Graver (Brolin) through the lens of Blunt’s Kate Macer, an outsider who is seeing all these grisly, gruesome acts for the first time. She bears the emotional weight of the film on her back and is the principal connection for us as the audience to process all the information we hear and see. Without her or any replacement in those shoes, the questions of legality and ethicality of the U.S. government’s action have no context and seem more legitimate than the first film might approve of. The brutality is now excused instead of questioned, and the lack of gravity present in the end product is a letdown.

I also saw a lot of problems with editing; in the first ten minutes, the film shows us images of undocumented immigrants making a border crossing, Islamic extremists suicide bombing a supermarket in Kansas City, and Graver torturing a potential source for information about said bombers. It threw the first act into some unexpected and unnecessary chaos; the entire purpose of these scenes is to position the drug cartels as abettors to different terrorist organizations, funneling their members into the country by smuggling them across the border. While I don’t mind that setup for the film, it felt so shaky and jostling that there had to be a better way to construct it. The terrorist thread that this starts lacks a satisfying conclusion as well: it wraps it up in one whole line of dialogue delivered from a supporting character.

There are some positive aspects to Soldado: del Toro and Brolin are in their usual excellent form, and the direction from Stefano Sollima in his English-language debut (his previous feature-length films are in Italian) is solid enough. I can’t shake this feeling, though, that he and screenwriter Taylor Sheridan (also returning from the previous installment) only manage a knock-off of Sicario and refrain from diving any deeper into its themes. Part of this is simply because Sollima and his cinematographer Dariusz Wolski will never be Villeneuve and Deakins; that I can excuse. What I cannot get over, however, is how in the current political climate a film that paints the border and its conflict in such an unambiguous light. There is a moral question to the actions shown in Soldado that is completely unasked due to relatively static character development and the lack of a lens like Blunt’s character from the previous film. Without that thematic inquiry, Soldado is a shell of its predecessor that, while entertaining, offers little that the first film did not have already.

My recommendation: Skip it.

My rating: 48/100