The hitman
Isaw scenes of “Sicario” at the height of last year’s Oscars noise but the movie didn’t get my interest (it got nominations for Best Cinematography, Best Original Score and Best Sound Editing). I forgot about the film until I caught it a few days ago on cable TV just when I had the time to spend to watch it at length. I soon found out how relevant its main conflict is to current Philippine realities.
The opening shot of the film, which stars Emily Blunt, Benecio del Toro and James Brolin, among others, says that the word “sicario” refers to zealots that occupied Palestine (around two centuries ago). I checked Wikipedia and found some interesting details. The Sicarii, it said, “were a splinter group of Jewish Zealots“that violently opposed the Roman occupation of Judea around 70 AD.
The Sicarii supposedly instigated violence to force the docile population to rise up against Rome. Assassination was once of these. They would attack Romans or their sympathizers in public gatherings using “sicae” or small dagger hidden in their cloaks, then blend with the crowd to escape detention.
In Mexico at the present time, “sicario” means “hitman,” which in the film obviously refers to del Toro’s character Alejandro, formerly with the Colombian drug cartel who wants to avenge the deaths of his wife, who was decapitated by the rival Mexican cartel, and his daughter, who was thrown into a vat of acid. But “Sicario is also about the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the “dirty war” against drugs. (Here, the CIA chose to allow the Colombian drug cartel to flourish instead of its Mexican counterpart because the former is supposedly more manageable.)
The main conflict here is between doing everything by the book in battling the drug cartels, as what Blunt’s character, the idealist Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent Kate Macer, believes, or holding on to the principle of the end justifies the means like what Brolin’s character, CIA agent Matt Graver, is following. In a way, this is about how Kate’s “innocence” is eventually lost.
The scenes here are bloody and disturbing, which I think is an apt description of how the “war” against drugs is mostly being waged everywhere. In one of the last few scenes, Alejandro finally confronts the Mexican drug cartel leader Fausto Alarcon while he is dining with his wife and two sons inside his mansion. As they calmly exchanged words, Alejandro suddenly shoots Alarcon’s wife and two sons, tells him to continue eating before eventually shooting him dead also.
In the penultimate scene, Alejandro slips into Kate’s apartment and at gunpoint forces her to sign a report stating that everything that was done to get Alarcon was “by the book.” Kate has the chance to kill him when he leaves, but chooses not to, symbolizing her final surrender of her innocence. Before that, Alejandro tells her to go to a smaller town where the rule of law still applies.
Although the final scene shows that the violence would not end because the next generation would eventually pick up where their elders left off, that scene with Kate had me thinking again about the current war the government is waging against illegal drugs. Will this lead to the loss of our “innocence,” too?