Sicario
Emily Blunt enters Sicario wary and tense, her head down. She’s playing an FBI agent named Kate Macer who has excellent reasons to feel anxious — even if she doesn’t yet know all of them. As the film’s opening scene plays out, Kate and her team of kidnapping specialists find not hostages in a nondescript Arizona house but dozens of corpses stuffed into walls.
These turn out to be victims of a Mexican cartel, and before long, Kate has been summoned by her superior (Victor Garber) and introduced to Matt Graver (Josh Brolin), an alleged “consultant” who invites her to join a special interagency task force designed to apprehend those responsible. Despite being given virtually no information, Kate accepts — a crucial choice revealing that Sicario isn’t really about the cartels or the drug war. Rather, it’s about the sneaky, underhanded ways that authority abuses power and about how difficult — how well-nigh impossible — it is for a person of conscience who witnesses said abuse to put a stop to it. Kate immediately distrusts Matt and likewise looks askance at a fellow named Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro), who is terminally vague about his place in the operation. But her growing alarm doesn’t lead her to quit, just in case the trail really does lead to the bad guys.
Directed by Denis Villeneuve (Prisoners, Enemy) and shot by the Coen brothers’ regular DP, Roger Deakins, Sicario works first and foremost as an unrelenting tension generator. Danger is omnipresent, and Blunt succeeds in making Kate simultaneously competent, tough and scared out of her wits. Villeneuve and screenwriter Taylor Sheridan reportedly fought the suits’ requests to change Kate into a man, and their decision to gradually squeeze her out of her own narrative, shifting the focus to Alejandro, is itself a boldly feminist statement, underlining the ways in which women (and minorities — Kate’s partner, significantly, is black) routinely and casually get ignored, used and discarded.
What seems to be missing — a climactic, crowd-pleasing scene in which Kate regains control or takes revenge — has been omitted very much intentionally.
