Second Sicario survives losses
Sequel without some top talent gets by on action and the script’s grasp of holdover characters
Sicario: Day of the Soldado
(out of 4) Starring Benicio Del Toro, Josh Brolin, Isabela Moner, Jeffrey Donovan, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Matthew Modine, Shea Whigham, Elijah Rodriguez and Catherine Keener. Directed by Stefano Sollima. Opens Friday at major theatres. 122 minutes. 14A
“No rules this time,” James Brolin tells Benicio Del Toro’s title hitman in Sica
rio: Day of the Soldado — and that sounds a lot like what he said the last time, in Denis Villeneuve’s original drug war thriller from 2015.
What this blood-splattered sequel truly lacks is Villeneuve at the helm, Emily Blunt in front of the camera and ace cinematographer Roger Deakins behind it, plus late Icelandic composer Johann Johannsson on the soundtrack.
That’s a serious list of deficits. Yet somehow Soldado gets by, thanks to strong performances, a script by returning Sicario scribe Taylor Sheridan that deepens understanding of familiar characters and a current grim reality that makes bellicose Americans threatening foreign states and people seem all the more plausible.
It’s directed by Stefano Sollima, whose resumé bonafides include the Gomorrah gangland series for Italian TV. He lacks Villeneuve’s flair for crafting mood and menace, but he conjures a reasonable facsimile that’s even more violent, especially in the action scenes — which include an attack on a convoy of Humvees on a dirt road that recalls Sicario’s pulseracing border bridge showdown.
The U.S.-Mexico boundary is again the focus of attention, but Soldado pays less attention to the drug trafficking that fuelled Sicario and more into the banditos behind it.
The film is also less concerned with the larger question of whether it’s right for U.S. government and law officials, who pledge allegiance to a flag representing high American ideals, to engage in covert ops that clearly don’t hold to accepted notions of truth and justice.
Brolin’s ruthlessly engaging CIA operative Matt Graver is more cutthroat than ever, emboldened by the expanded lethal latitude of what we presume is now the Trump Administration: “Dirty is exactly why you’re here,” Matthew Modine’s defence-secretary character assures him.
(It’s not just the boys playing macho: Catherine Keener cameos as an equally cynical CIA superior.)
The dirty tricks are supposedly justified via prologue scenes of cross-border suicide bombers, including a Kansas City supermarket attack blamed on Mexico.
The American plan is to have Mexican drug cartels destroy themselves by covertly turning them against each other, without the U.S. government being implicated. That’s a tall order, but Graver pays a return visit to aman he’s confident will deliver maximum impact and total discretion: taciturn ex-cartel hitman Alejandro (Del Toro), whom we meet again as he’s coldly dispatching a nameless baddie.
Alejandro’s new task, which he will decide to accept, is to kidnap schoolgirl Isabel Reyes (Isabel Moner, a revelation), the 12-year-old daughter of cartel kingpin Carlos Reyes. Alejandro and his CIA accomplices are to make it seem a rival cartel did the monstrous deed.
That surname will sound fa- miliar to Sicario fans. Carlos Reyes was the backstage Senor Big who ordered the killing of Alejandro’s wife and daughter, although it was a mid-level underling and his family who felt Alejandro’s payback wrath, in the previous movie’s most memorable and chilling scene.
To Graver’s dismay but the movie’s benefit, Isabel proves to be a tougher cookie than anyone expected and Alejandro proves to have something more than ice water in his veins. (His humanity will also be chal- lenged by a 14-year-old U.S. citizen, who is part of a subplot involving human trafficking.)
As Alejandro starts to question the wisdom and morality of the kidnapping caper, he effectively assumes the symbolic role of public conscience represented by Blunt’s FBI agent Kate Macer in Sicario.
At the end of that movie, Alejandro accused Kate of being a dove “in the land of the wolves.” Who’s the dove now, and which nation is really the land of the wolves?