Sicario

When a film works, the critical tendency is to praise the director and move outward from there. But the palm-sweat intensity of Sicario feels more like a triumph of brilliant actors and collaborators over a gaseous auteur.

Sicario was directed by Denis Villeneuve, and he brings the same heavy-handed pomposity to this story of an upright FBI agent (Emily Blunt) thrown neck-first into the moral swamp of the Mexican drug war that he brought to Prisoners and Enemy. Villeneuve never met a fat-headed thematic nail that he couldn’t hammer until his hands fell off, and first-time screenwriter Taylor Sheridan’s terse script only encourages some of his more lumbering and ponderous impulses.

And yet even as I was frequently annoyed by the film, I still found Sicario tense and nightmarishly immersive from its opening sequence of an FBI bust gone horribly wrong. Villeneuve deserves credit for crafting some gripping sequences (a standoff at a bottlenecked border crossing is another highlight), but the film would be unimaginable without the vivid and tactile cinematography of Roger Deakins, the bruising Johann Johannsson score and the gripping performances of Blunt, Josh Brolin and Benicio del Toro.

Blunt is amazing as Kate Macer, a brusque and driven field agent recruited by a shadowy conglomeration of military, law enforcement, intelligence agencies, vigilantes and criminals for a cross-border, extralegal mission whose targets and purpose are never fully explained. Kate is repulsed by the excessive firepower and unclear motives of her cartel-baiting comrades, but she still follows the mission from the corpse-strewn streets of Juarez into the subterranean tunnels on the Arizona border.

While Blunt’s performance expands upon the vulnerable but righteous badass she played in Edge of Tomorrow, the film makes Kate into such a drippy naïf that it becomes monotonous and borderline silly. Kate is hurled into a world that she doesn’t understand, even after it’s explained to her again and again and again. She encounters corruption around every corner, but keeps acting as though she’s learning about it for the first time, leading her to make choices that would be laughable even in a slasher film.

The ethically challenged supporting characters are more complex. Brolin’s sandal-wearing spook combines his flat-top fascist in Inherent Vice with some Doc Sportello-like bemusement. Del Toro is even better as the mysterious Alejandro, a shadowy “ghost” dressed all in white, and the flip side to his Oscar-winning performance in Traffic (a clear reference point here), all icy vengeance instead of baggy compassion.

More than anything, though, Sicario belongs to Deakins, a long-time Oscar bridesmaid who will probably win his first statue for the film. When the director doesn’t get in his way, Deakins delivers some of his most potent images— a rooftop view of Juarez on fire, a slow tracking shot toward scores of squatting detainees, the surreal night vision sequences, the suffocating close-ups. The black magic-hour moral pinch of this world is all there in the visuals … there’s no need for telling when a cameraman is this good at showing.