Air-punching sequel paves the way for more
Sicario 2: Soldado
15 Cert, 122min Dir Stefano Sollima Starring Josh Brolin, Benicio Del Toro, Isabela Moner, Catherine Keener, Jeffrey Donovan, Manuel Garcia-rulfo
It’s said that to understand a man you must first walk a mile in his shoes. But with Josh Brolin’s Matt Graver, just seeing them is enough. Graver made his entrance in Sicario, Denis Villeneuve’s 2015 ferocious cartel-busting thriller, wearing flip-flops to a top-level Department of Justice briefing – and he begins Stefano Sollima’s sequel browbeating a Somali pirate at a black site in Djibouti in a pair of khaki Crocs.
Practical, oh-so comfortable and possessed of a flexible soul, Graver is a dress-down-friday kind of special agent. And Sicario 2: Soldado’s attention to footwear shows it understands what made Villeneuve’s artfully glowering original tick. The new film – the title comes from Mexican Mafia jargon for “hitman” and “soldier” – is another tale of black ops in the borderlands.
This time, Graver and his partner Alejandro Gillick (Benicio del Toro), an elusive but hyper-capable hitman working for the US government, have been shifted centre-stage, and are presented as the more-or-less unambiguous heroes. Their mission is to spark a feud between rival cartels by staging what look like tit-for-tat attacks: the gunning down in broad daylight of one capo’s chief lawyer in Mexico City, and the kidnapping of the other’s daughter Isabel (Isabela Moner).
The idea is the ensuing internecine carnage will derail the growing human trafficking racket, which is allegedly allowing jihadists to slip into the US. But the scheme goes spectacularly awry, leaving Gillick in charge of the girl while Graver works frantically to clean up the mess. Absent is Emily Blunt’s upstanding FBI agent Kate Macer, who played audience surrogate, bearing increasingly horrified witness to the bleak reality of the drug war.
As such, this feels less like a commentary on lone-wolf machismo than a straightforward air-punching paean. But Sollima, an Italian veteran of the Gomorra TV series, stages the chaos with brow-furrowing, finger inter locking precision that feels entirely worthy of what I suppose we should now call the “Sicario brand”.
There is a riveting set-piece in which Brolin and co hammer across the border in a police motorcade, only for it to slowly dawn that something is wrong – a kind of breakneck remix of Villeneuve’s border-queue shoot-out, with a doom-laden build-up keeping to the Canadian director’s signature style.
The twin themes of border security and a child forcibly separated from her parents give Sicario 2 an unexpected tang of topicality – and early on, the (unseen) American President makes the Trumpian move of reclassifying the cartels as terrorist organisations in order to open up more brutal forms of recourse. But a plot that at first looks like a simple, gung-ho, in-and-out job soon takes on the more complex rise and fall of a miniseries, and hints at more stories to come, while signing off the one at hand with a satisfying snap.
Perhaps a Sicario series would make sense: if the market wants franchises, let’s have more like this, please.