The drug wars: getting high on violence
SICARIO is an intense, compelling and unnerving look at the MexicanAmerican border situation and specifically the reach and influence of the drug cartels. Right from the first scenes we are dropped into an violent spiral of action and reaction which highlights the increasingly complex tit for tat war of words and deeds played by the powers that be.
Blunt is the idealistic yet still very passionate FBI agent Kate Macer who is drawn into a multi-agency operation which calls into question everything she thought she knew. She leads a Special Weapons and Tactics team, but feels they are not doing enough to break the Mexican drug cartels.
After a grizzly discovery, a Department of Defence agent, Matt Graver (Brolin), brings her into a team of elite agents, saying their response will be disproportionately overblown.
Introduced to enigmatic Alejandro Gillick (Del Toro) who appears to be Graver’s partner, Macer asks questions, but gets cryptic answers like: “You ask how the watch is made. Keep your eye on the time.”
Starting with an extradition of a prisoner out of Juarez, Mexico, across the Mexican-US border, Graver doles out only small amounts of information, seeming to relish the control.
Gillick remains a tightly wound shadow who haunts the edges of the action, though every now and then he bursts into action, then backs off to lurk again.
One of director Villeneuve’s trademarks is the realistic portrayal of violence and looking at the impact it has on individuals. Here the overly-graphic portrayal at first feels gratuitous, but then you start being drawn into the stories of individuals affected by these cycles of violence.
Macer’s story of being part of, but not privy to the specifics of the operation, is seen at the same time as Mexican policeman Silvio’s (Maximiliano Hernández)’s story is tracked, as is that of a young teen who ends up wandering the streets of Juarez, Mexico.
The film’s ending belongs to Del Toro, though, when Gillick is set loose across the border and you see how he has embraced the violence meted out on him.
Roger Deakins’s cinematography has an almost documentary feel to it – a great deal of the film is shot from Macer’s point of view, with some of it from Gillick’s point of view and then lots of sweeping helicopter shots that give you an overview and a breather before plunging you back into violence.
Night camera work plus up close, complicated action sequences which put you in the thick of things, effective sound design and an electronically manipulated soundtrack create a tense atmosphere.
The storyline is slight, but the characterisation of the main players and the tense atmosphere are the overriding factors that keep you on the edge of your seat and make you question why anyone believes that doing the same thing over and over is going to give you a different result.
The film-maker gives us no answers either way, he simply paints a beautiful and haunting picture of a very ugly situation which sits uneasily with the viewer because we are fascinated and glued to the screen, but then realise we just sat through two hours of watching people dying in violent ways.