Movie Reviews: Sicario 2: Day of The Soldado

Sicario: Day of The Soldado
directed by Stefano Sollima

The first Sicario movie was a brooding examination of the moral costs of revenge, the war on drugs, and perhaps the standing of the souls of Kate Mercer (Emily Blunt) and Alejandro Gillick (Benicio Del Toro). The ending let us know that as majestic and purposeful as one of those characters was, they were definitely going to hell when they died. 

Well that was one way to look at it. The other way is the Old Testament way in which we show no pity and pay life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot until the bitter cup of revenge is drunk in full by everyone.  The Old Testament is full of people taking righteous and not so righteous revenge upon people who harmed them or just happened to be in the way of some divinely ordered smackdown. 

This "kill em all" way of thinking can often be justified by the "good guys"-just ask any survivor of the WW2 firebombings of Dresden or Tokyo about that-but in most entertainment there's a line beyond which "good guys" don't cross, no matter how righteous the purpose may be. Alejandro crosses those lines in the first Sicario and doesn't appear to be in any need of forgiveness or redemption. He made his choice. You might understand his choice or despair at his choice but there is no denying that the character knew what he was doing. Like Marv in Sin City, Alejandro has decided that there are certain people or concepts worth killing for, worth dying for, and worth going to hell for.

We saw that in the first movie. So although Del Toro is cool enough to make watching a second movie featuring him an entertaining feature, ultimately the film is empty. We've already seen that the character will not shrink from the worst atrocity if he feels it will serve his purpose.  It feels like a cheap trick to put the character in essentially the same spot he was at the end of the last film and ask will he or won't he? 

We already know he will. That came as a shock at the end of the first movie which is probably why Mercer and not Alejandro was the protagonist of the first movie. In this movie the lead time is split between Alejandro and his CIA agent handler Matt Graver (Josh Brolin). Both men are shown as casually brutal when they need to be but even their callousness does not match that of their civilian masters, Defense Secretary Riley (Matthew Modine) and CIA Station Chief Foards (Catherine Keener).

When a suicide bombing takes place in Kansas City the military intelligence community believes that the perpetrators were smuggled across the US: Mexican border by Mexican drug cartels. So the smart people who gave you the Iraq war decide that the best way to get revenge on the cartels is to make them fight each other. To this end they decide to kidnap the teen daughter Isabel (Isabel Moner) of  the boss of one cartel while murdering a bigwig in a different cartel. Obviously though the best laid plans don't work.

There's a lot of apparently realistic violence. A subplot that winds its way into the main storyline involves a low level cartel flunky who is corrupting his young cousin Miguel (Elijah Rodriguez) into the organized crime business of human smuggling. If you are looking for deep three dimensional characterization look elsewhere. Perhaps unintentionally(?) this movie would seem to endorse the clash of civilizations framework under which so much of the discussion of the US:Mexican border takes place. If you just like to see a shoot em up maybe this hits the spot but as a sequel it was unnecessary and occasionally contradictory. There was a point here somewhere about moral ambiguity but it was lost in the gunfire. The film visually looked good, especially the nighttime shots. The musical score is worth a listen.
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