Sicario

The Geography of Predators

I'm not really sure when the modern action thriller decided it needed to be so loud. We live in an era where cinematic violence is typically cranked to eleven, scored with blaring horns and cut to shreds in the editing room so you don't actually have to sit with the weight of a bullet hitting bone. Then there's Denis Villeneuve’s *Sicario* (2015). Villeneuve doesn't want you to just see the violence on the US-Mexico border; he wants you to feel the heavy, suffocating dread of waiting for it to happen. It's a film about cartels and government overreach, sure, but mostly it's an exercise in watching idealism slowly suffocate in a vacuum.



You can see that suffocation perfectly in Emily Blunt’s physicality as FBI agent Kate Macer. After a botched raid in the Arizona suburbs uncovers dozens of corpses hidden inside drywall, Kate is recruited by a deeply shadowy inter-agency task force. Blunt spends the first half of the film physically shrinking into herself. Her shoulders are rigid. Her jaw stays clenched. She's a by-the-book operative thrust into a world that doesn't merely bend the rules, but casually ignores that rules ever existed. Beside her is Josh Brolin’s Matt Graver, a CIA spook who wears flip-flops to briefings and smiles with the terrifying ease of a man who knows exactly who is going to die today.



The film’s centerpiece is a border crossing sequence into Juárez that functions as a masterclass in subjective tension. Villeneuve traps us inside Kate’s point of view as a convoy of black SUVs creeps through traffic. A lesser director would have turned this into a noisy shootout immediately. Villeneuve makes us wait. The camera pans over a gridlock of cars, lingering on the exhaust fumes and the nervous eyes of the tactical team. When the violence finally erupts on the crowded highway, it isn't an extended battle. One agent spots a threat, the team steps out of their vehicles, and they execute the cartel hitmen in a matter of seconds. It's terrifyingly clinical. The Curb's Andrew Peirce rightly observed that it's a film "that simply doesn't let up," and that relentless quiet is exactly what makes the sudden bursts of gunfire so deeply jarring.



And then there's Benicio del Toro. He plays Alejandro, a former prosecutor turned cartel hitman working with the Americans to exact his own revenge. For years, del Toro made a career playing eccentric, scene-stealing oddballs in films like *The Usual Suspects* and *Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas*. Here, he strips away all the theatrics. He is terrifyingly still. (Villeneuve and del Toro actually cut most of Alejandro's dialogue from Taylor Sheridan’s original script, trusting the actor's heavy-lidded eyes to do the work.) Watch him in the final scene with Kate. His voice barely rises above a whisper. He doesn't yell; he just explains the grim reality of the world they're standing in. Whether that absolute cynicism is a flaw in the film's worldview or its most honest feature depends on your patience for bleakness. I left the theater feeling like I needed a shower, which, I suppose, means the film did exactly what it set out to do.