Year: 2015
Director: Denis Villeneuve
Screenplay: Taylor Sheridan
Starring: Emily Blunt, Josh Brolin, Benicio Del Toro
Higgins: “No. Absolutely not. We have games. That's
all. We play games. What if? How many men? What would it take? Is there a
cheaper way to destabilize a regime? That's what we're paid to do.”
-
Three Days of Condor (1975)
Ice Cube: “You get AK’s from Russia and Cocaine from Columbia.”
Eazy E: “And ain’t none of us got a passport! So you might wanna check the
source…”
-
Straight Outta Compton (2015)
Sicario plays a behind the scenes of the source Eazy E
mentions, by the rules similar to what Higgins implies. Beginning with a tense
and explosive siege, the grim revelation that’s found becomes an ominous analogy.
Although less Skeleton’s in the closest, more corpses in the plaster wall.
Underground Rapper Immortal Technique could have conceived
an album based on the narrative curveballs that Denis Villeneuve’s crime drama
spins towards its viewer. It’s a film which not only firmly cements
Villeneuve’s recurring theme of personal, insular prisons, but once again
highlights that such prisons tickle down from the larger containment. In
Villeneuve’s twisted doppelganger humdinger; Enemy (2013), this involved the
sticky webbed influence of Spiders. Here in Sicario, we’re asked to pry apart
the tenacious strands of the drug trade, which have been weaved between North
and South America.
This tightly wound production falls into a similar camp as A
Most Violent Year (2014). The moral structures that our lead character; Kate (A
passive, but seething Emily Blunt) begin to deteriorate and crumble to show how
much of a fallacy the lines of the law really are. No one is to be trusted and the long arm of
the law is cracked and fractured in several places. We keenly observe this in
the opening shots, were swat teams operate a high risk manoeuvres while neighbours take dogs on their afternoon walks. In the lead up to one of Sicario’s more tense
sequences, mutilated bodies hang freely under intersection freeways, while
locals nonchalantly play squash in the next street. Good? Bad? In the world of
Sicario, it just is.
Much is owed to Roger Deakins cinematography. His control of
light and shadow is effortless, as is his ability to clarify the imagery to augment
the message. Sicario holds wide shots which isolate Blunt’s Kate both outside
and inside government structures which she suddenly feels alien to. The Star
Spangled Banner gloatingly hovers over or behind her while she argues her case.
So much for what she considers as the American way. By the time we get to the
third act, which involves locating border tunnels, we’re viewing images in
inferred camera Inverting colour into blurred monochrome shades of gray. We are
literally in the dark with little awareness of who the villains are, even
though the team have gone in as friends.
It’s easy to argue that Sicario comes at a time where the
competition doesn’t feel as stiff as previous eras. It’s not a typical period
piece or biopic that fares so well during the Oscars. But that doesn’t matter
in the slightest. Sicario not only throbs and pulses like it’s near elemental
soundtrack. Its brutally precise execution of its themes, sit in the pit of the
stomach like a block of ice. Denis Villeneuve confronts the subject with the
same dynamic fortitude that makes Sicario stand tall with similar features of
its ilk. For this blogger, this is one of the year’s best.
