Movie Reaction: Sicario: Day of the Soldado

Formula: Sicario - Training Day

My two favorite things about 2015's Sicario were Emily Blunt's stabilizing lead performance and Denis Villeneuve's expert direction. Without those things, Sicario looked like virtually every other movie or show about the U.S.-Mexican border. It feels like there's some movie or show about the topic every year or two. Benicio del Toro won an Oscar in 2000 in Traffic. The FX show The Bridge covered this exact topic. Documentaries like Cartel Land look into the topic in depth. Even shows like Weeds took a lighter look at it. Even if all the same pieces returned, I didn't see a need for a sequel to Sicario. Making a sequel and taking away Blunt and Villenueve sounded just plain dumb.

Sicario: Day of the Soldado is more inconsequential than it is bad. And that's selling it way short. The idea for Sicario as a series appears to be more about universe-building than continuing a single story. Sicario was about Blunt's character getting introduced to the border war. Soldado tells a more specific story. The movie begins with a terrorist attack on U.S. After the department of defense discovers that some of the terrorists used the drug cartels for safe passage into the country, the Secretary of Defense (Matthew Modine) sets up a CIA task force led by Special Agent Matt Graver (Josh Brolin) to provoke a war between competing Mexican cartels, hoping they'll wipe each other out so the U.S. doesn't have to. Graver is told that there are no rules and he can play as dirty as he wants. He puts together a team including notorious mercenary Alejandro Gillick (Benicio del Toro). Their plan is to kidnap the daughter of a drug kingpin and make it look like she was taken by a rival cartel. After a lot of cloak and dagger operations, this eventually leads to Gillick and the girl in the middle of Mexico with a lot of people looking to kill them.

Pretty immediately, replacement director Stefano Sollima eases any concerns that the loss of Villeneuve will be a problem. He has a great eye for this world and handles the tension of it equally as well. Some credit, no doubt, goes to his DP Dariusz Wolski too. It helps that Taylor Sheridan returned to pen this screen as well. The stakes feel bigger this time. The set pieces certainly are. I only remember one or two big action scenes in the first film. Soldado doubles that and goes bigger. That would bother me if the movie was going for more realism. As is, it keeps things interesting.

It's hard not to get sucked in by what Del Toro and Brolin are doing in this. After very mannered performances in Marvel and Star Wars movies, Del Toro moves back into serious mode and it's refreshing. He has terrific word economy throughout this. He won't use 10 words when one or a grunt will do. He's less of a bogeyman this time around. Brolin has an intense ease to him. He walks around with the confidence of a man who knows that he's the best at what he does but doesn't need other people to know it. I'd like to get a beer with him, but I would be afraid to have a disagreement with him. The cartel kingpin's daughter is played by Isabela Moner. I certainly like her more in this than I did in the last Transformers movie. I appreciate how she starts as a tough girl early on, and we get to see how that falls apart when she's actually put in danger. Other actors get to do some nice work in smaller roles. Catherine Keener is essentially Brolin's bureaucratic PR counterpart. Jeffrey Donovan stops just short of trying to be a scene-stealer as one of the other agents in Brolin's crew. Personally, I imagined he was Michael Westen under a deep cover. Elijah Robinson gets an initially unrelated storyline that runs parallel to the main story as a young man who gets involved in the cartel's human smuggling operation across the border.

My main issue with the movie was that the story gets a little too convenient a little too often, especially with Del Toro. He becomes more of a superhuman than someone who bleeds, which is less interesting than someone who actually feels like he could be in danger. There's a moment that requires him to know another language completely by chance that's reverse-engineered to give his back story some depth. A couple lucky or unluck beats dictate a lot of how the story plays out. Any one of these things are forgivable, but combined, it's a bit much (See: One big leap).

For the most part, I quite enjoyed Soldado*. I doubt another movie this year will mix tension and action as well as this. The world it explores is deep and rich. I really feel like I could happily watch a dozen loosely connected movies in this world (It helps that it's basically a sensationalized version of the real world). Sicario isn't a franchise I ever thought I needed, but it's one that I'm happy to have around.

*The title was supposed to be Soldado, but "Sicario: Day of the" was added to let audiences know it's a sequel. I understand the change, but Soldado really is a better title.

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend