Sicario

SICARIO   **

Denis Villeneuve

2015

IDEA:  An FBI agent is enlisted by a government task force to help target the head of a major Mexican drug cartel.

BLURB:  As our entry point into Sicario’s world of abject moral chaos, Emily Blunt is a dramatically convincing audience surrogate. Her visceral confoundment and revulsion at the immoral tactics being employed around her, by both her own governmental team and its gangland opposition, is potent, and is shared in every way by the spectator. This conception of real-life morass turned personal nightmare is Villeneuve’s most effective strategy: unfortunately, it is not nearly enough to compensate for his film’s narrative and ideological deficits, which run deep through a clunky, hackneyed script. Content to rehash a boilerplate formula without added nuance, the film goes through the prosaic motions of a morally ambivalent 21st century political thriller, concluding with redundancy that the supposed good guys are just as corrupt as the criminals, and violence begets violence, and nobody wins. Its indictment of US exceptionalism and the untenable suspension of ethical standards in the pursuit of a goal might hit harder if any of the characters actually felt like dimensional human beings, or if Emily Blunt, so emotionally bared, didn’t exist in the story just so that she could finally be put in her place by imperious men. Sicario may have damning words for those men and for the terror they’re so ready to breed, but instead of disempowering them it resigns itself, unimaginatively, to their bankrupt reality.