“It’s an unfortunate development that saw Sicario released into American theaters amidst a surfeit of nonsensical campaign rhetoric from Donald Trump that sought to demonize our neighbor to the south. And while the real tragedy of this narrative is that a legitimate presidential candidate soft-balling cartoonish hate speech can find a sizable demographic clambering for it, the lower stakes misfortune is that a subset of moviegoers may misappropriate Sicario's narrative and miss out on the considerable technical craft and the slow-burn brilliance it has to offer.
“With Emily Blunt acting as cipher, the audience follows her down an increasingly-unsettling rabbit hole into a slantways world of corruption and moral inexactitude. Whereas a lesser film may have contented itself to wallow in the murkiness of ambiguous ethics, Sicario instead seems to suggest even that perspective is a an illusory luxury of the ignorant and that the only real code is one of subjective fluidity - the ends justify the means, uncompromisingly, ad infinitum. And while the film's opening salvo introduces the narrative trajectory of a well-meaning officer joining forces with government higher-ups in a desire to do real good, the filmmakers quickly eighty-six any possibility on an honorable reckoning and instead make each passing minute feel grimier and more debased, casting us as unwitting accomplices to the film's burgeoning malignancy.
“By the final third, it is clear that Sicario is functionally a horror film where every musical cue and otherwise unassuming establishing shot takes on increasing significance as the ratcheted tension impossibly continues to build. Sicario brazenly offers us the most abstract of boogeymen: the loss of ignorance - and so the film’s nominal though impotent heroine (Emily Blunt) comes to find out, sometimes the act of pulling back a curtain represents the only real villain, something Denis Villeneuve and company depict with terribly bleak beauty.” ~ Luke Gorham
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