Like many of Denis Villeneuve’s films, Sicario presented a convoluted narrative masking an even more complex moral quandary that ultimately resolved into a simplistic yet contradictory fable. In its jumbled, often stereotypical depiction of drug-war politics was at least an attempt to reckon with the impossibility of the United States ever triumphing in its War on Drugs. The bait-and-switch plot twist of hired hitman Alejandro (Benicio del Toro) ultimately using the US government as unwitting backup in his own personal vendetta against a cartel even hinted at a cold critique of America’s foreign policy the last 15 years, of charging into regions to enact massive infrastructural change, only to become embroiled in proxy wars between rival indigenous factions.
Sicario: Day of the Soldado foregrounds this political context, presenting a scenario in which the US, dealing with a suicide bomb attack by terrorists who crossed the Mexican border with cartel cover, is suddenly given the power to unilaterally escalate its anti-cartel activities with the full capacity of the state’s surveillance and black ops apparatus. The secretary of defense (Matthew Modine) personally enlists clandestine operator Matt Graver (Josh Brolin) to stoke the cartels into internecine wars to make them easier to fight, a strategy that some assembled military brass boast unironically that they learned in Iraq. Once again looking to Alejandro to lead his expedition, Matt decides that the best way to provoke a gangland war is to kidnap the child of one drug lord and pin it on another. Yet for all the montages of military power and well-trained execution by Matt’s team, his plan falls apart almost immediately, exposing the farcical egotism of his assumption that everything will work out exactly as he sees it.
In the hands of someone like, say, Paul Verhoeven, this has the makings of a wild, brutal satire of America’s ruinous foreign policy, which has eroded to the extent that it now blows back on this country as much as it affects others. Even early, intensely problematic images of huddled immigrants and self-immolating Muslim terrorists could be bent toward an unsparing comic impulse if the film suggested that we were seeing those images through the prism of Amerocentric propaganda. Instead, director Stefan Sollima plays the material with thudding literalism, crafting an emptily nihilistic, reductive look of the destruction of “both sides,” from the US’ clumsy interventions to the overwhelming corruption in Latin America, the latter leading to justified paranoia on behalf of the characters as nearly every single person encountered south of the border, including all police, actively seek to kill Isabela (Isabela Moner), the abducted daughter of a Colombian drug lord.
For all the racist terror that the film conjures, however, it never attaches any actual tension to the neverending assaults of crooked cops, rival cartel enforcers and nervous black-ops turncoats. Hildur Guðnadóttir’s score sets a mood with ominous, bass-heavy pulses of electronic whirs and moans, but the film’s sloppy plot mechanics prevent any generation of suspense. Enemy characters exist as ephemeral obstacles, never explicitly tied to any one group or other so that it’s impossible to tell whether cartel members are trying to rescue Isabela or kill her. People move deliberately but always seem to be in exactly the right spot, a trend that eventually becomes comical. If Villeneuve’s film gradually simplified itself into losing some of its complex potential, Sollima’s film keeps unraveling, losing more and more focus until characters seem to shoot each other for no other reason that the script calls for action.
Not even the leads can pretend to invest in this film. Brolin, looking bullish and callously evil as Matt, nonetheless utilizes little of his capacity for brooding, indifferent narcissism, leaving the character to do nothing but smirk at the possibility of fostering war. Del Toro fares even worse; in the previous film, he convincingly gave Alejandro a blackly moral streak, a ruthlessness born of great trauma. Here, however, the actor recites lines with a dullness that borders on somnambulism. His scenes with Moner perfunctorily cast the film as a western, with Alejandro as the mythic hero figure who stands outside the law to protect the innocent. However, Sicario: Day of the Soldado never attaches a coherent moral view to Alejandro, much less its larger conflicts. That the film so obviously spotlights its thematic points makes its ultimate lack of any remote resolution all the more baffling, an excuse to set up a sequel whose biggest selling point so far is the possibility that it might explain why anyone bothered to sit through this franchise entry.
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