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In the wild west of show business, there are those whose artistic integrity serves as a sort of glue for the entertainment industry’s precarious reputation. Denis Villeneuve, of Dune, Blade Runner 2049, and Arrival fame, is one such artist, as is Yellowstone franchise mastermind Taylor Sheridan. Indeed, whenever one of these two are behind the storytelling wheel, viewers can count on being in safe hands.
Such was made apparent when the duo brought Sicario to life together in 2015 — Sheridan as the scribe, Villeneuve as the helmsman. The irony of it all, however, is that watching a film like Sicario evokes the exact opposite emotion of safety, but then, that’s as good a reason as any to plunge into a tale from Sheridan and/or Villeneuve in the first place. The denizens of Netflix, in any case, have found plenty of reasons to take that plunge.
Per FlixPatrol, Sicario is writhing around in ninth place on the Netflix film charts in the United States at the time of writing. Its closest competition? The direly incompetent Venom: The Last Dance (10th place) and the slightly stronger but still sugary Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (eighth place). Indeed, Sicario is a robust fish out of water here in content country.
Armed to the teeth with the likes of Emily Blunt, Benicio del Toro, Daniel Kaluuya, Jon Bernthal, and Josh Brolin, Sicario follows FBI agent Kate Macer (Blunt) as she gets assigned to a special task force with the aim of taking down the leader of a drug cartel. As the operation drags out and one disturbing revelation leads to another, Kate becomes nauseatingly familiar with the underbelly of the war on drugs — in particular, the roll that governments decide to play in their management of them.
As far as action thrillers go, Sicario is on the low-octane side — a necessary approach so as to drive home its philosophy on violence. Within the opening minutes of Sicario, the camera lingers long and piercingly on the rotting corpses of hostages taken by the cartel, forcing audiences to consider the consequences of the violence that they so often cheer for in the movies, and if they’re willing to stomach the reality of those consequences.
Moreover, whenever the proceedings do give way to gunplay, Villeneuve is careful not to give it any flair, opting instead to unload a quick jolt of carnage — which is all you need to take a life, or even several lives — so as to once again leave us with the blood and bodies while the boys’ club of the task force bump chests and crack insensitive quips. It’s no accident that our protagonist is a harborer of the feminine spirit.
In this action thriller, violence is not something to giddily anticipate, but to be frightened by. It doesn’t frame the violence as heroic for one side and antagonistic for the other, and in fact makes a point to pull the attention away from the traditional notion of sides. In Sicario‘s world, the only thing keeping you and your family out of the crosshairs is some combination of compliance and dumb luck, because there are some corners of the world that the law simply doesn’t last in, and it’s up to us as individuals to keep our worlds from falling into those corners.