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The drug war hots up, this time with a teenager as collateral.

- SICARIO: DAY OF THE SOLDADO directed by Stefano Sollima

Sicario: Day of the Soldado, Ideal Home, Double Lover

In three films released since 2015, writer Taylor Sheridan crafted a triptych of American decay: Wind River, Hell or High Water and Sicario. They are defiantly bleak and unashamedl­y male, but show an understand­ing of the degradatio­ns of history: despondent cops and righteous cowboys adapted for a new, less heroic age.

Sicario was the best, not just because Sheridan was aided by director Denis Villeneuve, cinematogr­apher Roger Deakins and composer Jóhann Jóhannsson. It traversed the US-Mexico border in pursuit of drug cartels, with Emily Blunt’s indignant officer embroiled in a dark CIA plot to restore the Medellín gang to supremacy. It was a throwback to the Iran-Contra days, when the Reagan Administra­tion trafficked in mullahs, death squads and cocaine, and got away with it.

Sicario was boldly cynical and uncompromi­singly violent, and its sequel, Day of the Soldado (also written by Sheridan, but directed by Stefano Sollima), doubles down on both the cynicism and the brutality. Without Blunt, there isn’t any innocence to be lost. There are no good guys, and there’s certainly no redemption.

Establishi­ng a tone of despair and depravity, the film opens with a raid on migrants crossing the border. One of them breaks away, utters a prayer and blows himself up.

Cut to Kansas, and a horrible sequence in which three jihadists, ignoring the pleas of a mother and daughter, commit murder-suicide in a crowded supermarke­t.

The US Government’s response is no less bloodthirs­ty. CIA agent Matt (Josh Brolin) and Medellín hitman Alejandro (Benicio del Toro) pair up again, this time to extrajudic­ially kidnap a cartel boss’s daughter (Isabela Moner).

If Day of the Soldado has any heart, it is in Moner’s performanc­e: wide-eyed and almost serene amid the chaos. But even she is not free of violence, slapping around a fellow schoolgirl.

Any parallel or comparison drawn between this film and the present political situation is stretched and superficia­l.

We’re in the realm of the bloody thriller, not the piercing, prescient documentar­y. (For that, see Matthew Heineman’s Cartel Land.)

The plot, the kind of deranged, rightwing conspiracy theory about which disgraced actor Steven Seagal recently wrote a novel, is something of an insult to Sheridan’s tense, uncluttere­d narrative in Sicario.

And yet, something about its nihilistic cynicism feels entirely apt. After the carnage, gunfights, executions, and a grenade casually tossed into a pursuing vehicle, the characters are left to look on the dusty aftermath. They gaze around and, for a moment, wonder if there’s any point to it.

IN CINEMAS NOW James Robins

If Day of the Soldado has any heart, it is in Isabela Moner’s performanc­e: wide-eyed and almost serene amid the chaos.

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