Films > Film Reviews

Sicario

15/10/15

I’ve been thinking about how I decide which movies I go to see at the cinema. And, yes, I do decide beforehand. I don’t blindly turn up at a cinema and stare at the listings board for 15 minutes and then make my choice. Some movies are on the viewing schedule as soon they are announced. Others seem to come out of nowhere.

Four weeks ago I hadn’t even heard of Sicario.

Internet buzz, a stylishly presented trailer, and a decent cast meant I was prepared to put my hand in my pocket, and my bum on a cinema seat on a wet afternoon in mid-October.  Most people who know me would tell you that if a movie hasn't got spaceships or super heroes in, I’m not really interested. Clearly that's not the case, as my two favorites this year have been an intimate, near-future sci-fi tale about the birth of artificial intelligence, and a minimalist re-working of the classic American teen horror flick. Add to that now a third - a bleak, morally ambiguous tale of one woman’s journey through America’s war on drugs with it’s neighbor, Mexico.

We hit the ground running, literally, with this movie, and after a brutal and disturbing opening sequence that introduces us to Emily Blunt’s commendable and loyal F.B.I. agent, pretty soon a pervading sense of disorientation and not quite seeing the whole picture takes over.  Clearly storywriter Taylor Sheridan intended it to be this way, and director Denis Villeneuve takes his cues from this and delivers a master-class in tension building set pieces and disorientating visual motifs.

Shots of unfocussed body bags looking right down the camera lens at you. The camera lingering for just too long on a scene that doesn't really have anything to do with the story....does it? Seemingly important characters having muted conversation where you don't understand the detail of what they're talking about. Compound that visual imbalance with Roger Deakins’ desolate landscape cinematography, and a creeping drone of a soundtrack by Johann Johannsson that could make you feel as sick as any of the hinted atrocity and torture that we (don't really) see, and you just know that things are probably going to go from bad to worse and pretty damn quickly too.

For me the strength of this movie is in the crafting. Not to belittle the performances of the main cast. Josh Brolin’s flippant, manipulative CIA operative and Benicio Del Toro's mysterious advisor are instrumental in building the duplicitous, deceptive tendencies that this movie has. But it's through Emily Blunt’s character and performance that we really get to experience the dark heart of this film, as we’re dragged from one out of control situation to another, along with the men and women who wage war on the illegal activities that occur on the U.S/ Mexican boarder.

Whilst the climax never quite exceeds the tipping point intensity of the highway shoot out, or the clinical execution of the nighttime tunnel raid (most of which is shot using night and heat vision cameras to great claustrophobic effect) I ask myself the question ‘does it really have to?’ Much like the characters in this movie, by the time you’re done with it, you won't know if you’ve been rooting for the good guys or the bad guys, let alone if those black and white archetypes actually exist in the scarred, arid, grey world of Sicario that they inhabit.

8.5/10