The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
In ‘Day of the Soldado,’ an equally bleak ‘Sicario’
There’s an oppressive bleakness to the brutal action-thriller “Sicario: Day of the Soldado.” But with faces like Josh Brolin and Benicio del Toro, what are you going to do?
Amid the dust cloud of violence that settles over the “Sicario” sequel, nothing stands out like the furrowed brow of Brolin’s grimace or the cold, wornout stare of del Toro. They look like gunslingers from an Anthony Mann or Sam Peckinpah western, just with heavier ammo and dark sunglasses. With such sunken, world-weary
eyes, in the heyday of film noir del Toro and Brolin would have made a killing.
They do plenty of that, too, in “Sicario: Day of the Soldado.” Matt Graver (Brolin) and his cartel lawyerturned-undercover-pal Alejandro Gillick (del Toro) are again called into action in a black-ops operation along the Mexico border, this time without the benefit of Emily Blunt, who starred in Denis Villeneuve’s “Sicario” (2015).
Blunt played a less experienced FBI agent with the naivety to be horrified by things that Graver and Gillick wouldn’t bat an eye at — you know, sissy stuff like dozens of decaying corpses stuffed like insulation into a Mexican cartel safe house. No, Graver and just-asgrave Gillick have seen it all. And Blunt’s absence leaves “Day of Soldado” without the mounting sense of dread that defined the first one.
It also lacks the muscular camera work of Villeneuve and cinematographer Roger Deakins. With such missing talent, it would be easy to view “Day of the Soldado” as a cheaper knockoff. Easier, still, considering the movie’s poster — of a gun-toting skeleton draped in a flag — most resembles a Guns N’ Roses album cover.
It’s better than that, but not by much. Stefano Sollima (“Gomorrah”) steps in to direct a script by Taylor Sheridan, whose neo-westerns (”Hell or High Water,” “Wind River”) have made him the genre’s best new hope. Sheridan wrote “Sicario,” too, which sought to modernize the drug-war thriller to catch it up to the lethal battles of today’s cartels.
But in its ballet of SUVS sweeping across the border, “Sicario” mostly stood for a ruthless, borderless American power equaling the ultra-violence of a new era, with all the moral doubt that accompanies such a fight. “Day of the Soldado” begins with a similar stab at political relevance. A supermarket in Kansas City is attacked by a swarm of suicide bombers, the last of whom we watch detonate his vest just as a mother and child are trying to tiptoe past.
It’s believed the bombers were jihadis who infiltrated the country by slipping through the Mexican border. Told that the cartels control the trafficking of migrants over the border, the Secretary of Defense (Matthew Modine) opts to clandestinely prompt a war between two cartels. Graver’s plan is to kidnap the 12-year-old daughter of a cartel kingpin to kick-start the war.
There’s a mean potency to the borderland noir of both “Sicario” films that recalls another tale of explosions and drug enforcement agents on both sides of the border: Orson Welles’ “Touch of Evil.”
Though it is too sober and grim for that film, it has taken to heart one of its best lines: “All border towns bring out the worst in a country.”