The good-natured escapist fun of the summer movie season gets viciously murdered in broad daylight by Sicario: Day of the Soldado, a sequel to 2015’s drug-war drama that finds only violence, misery, and amorality everywhere it turns.
Charting the U.S.’s continued involvement along its southern border, Stefano Sollima’s superior follow-up is a horror story posing as a tactical military thriller, all callous political maneuvering, senseless bloodshed and unachieved ambitions, set to bass-heavy braying and industrial noise (courtesy of Hildur Gudnadottir, working in the same vein as late composer Johann Johannson) that operates as a suitable soundtrack for this apocalyptic nightmare. A vision of a world without rules, and the chaotic carnage that comes from such anarchy, it’s the bleakest studio offering in recent memory, and the frontrunner for feel-bad movie of the year.
Of course, Sicario wasn’t exactly an uplifting effort, though it did boast Emily Blunt’s FBI agent—a badass who proves downright aghast at the rule-breaking behavior of her cohorts—as its comforting moral conscience. Blunt’s protagonist was the most preposterous element of Villeneuve’s original, a character whose naiveté about the measures required to combat the cartels was, in light of her position as an elite federal agent skilled (and experienced) enough to be assigned to a Department of Justice task force, pure absurdity. Unsurprisingly then, her absence is welcome in Day of the Soldado, given that it allows the film to admit that, in this unforgiving universe, no actual handwringing about the ugliness of Mexico’s drug gangs, or the brutal methods required to handle them, really exists. Everyone, it’s clear, is on the same equally grim page.
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Penned, like its predecessor, as a proto-Western by Taylor Sheridan (Hell or High Water, Wind River), Day of the Soldado’s story is initiated by a suicide bombing carried out by a Muslim terrorist trying to sneak into the U.S. via the Mexico border, and a subsequent explosive attack perpetrated by four Muslim men in a Kansas City store. Arriving in theaters at the very moment our commander-in-chief is arguing for greater immigration reform and border security based on scenarios similar to these, this opening salvo is the unintended beneficiary of fortuitous timing. And director Sollima (best known for his work on Italian TV crime series Gomorrah) stages both of these atrocities with severe foreboding and mounting suspense, as well as—in his focus on a mother and child trying to sneak out of the retailer’s front door—a refusal to soften the pitilessness of such slaughter.
Far from just a Trumpian wet dream, however, Day of the Soldado quickly turns out to be a far more conflicted beast. That’s immediately apparent thanks to the conduct of CIA officer Matt Graver (Josh Brolin), whose post in Africa compels him to take exceedingly cold-blooded action when a captured pirate refuses to cooperate. Walking around in Crocs and sporting a bushy beard, Graver is, as before, a merciless man who never pulls his punches, and that quality soon puts him on the radar of Secretary of Defense James Riley (Matthew Modine), who believes that the aforementioned attacks indicate that Mexico’s cartels are now in the business of smuggling terrorists onto domestic soil. His solution: to have Graver treat our southern neighbor as “Afghanistan” and start a war between the Reyes cartel and one of its rivals, all while keeping America’s own hand in this scheme hidden.
It’s a Yojimbo-ish plot that leads Graver to enlist the aid of former mate Alejandro Gillick (Benicio del Toro) on a mission that entails murdering a lawyer (to pin on the Reyes clan) and then kidnapping Reyes’ daughter Isabela (a commanding Isabela Moner) and making it look like a retaliatory move. Those initial maneuvers are successful, as well as shine a spotlight on the depraved nature of everyone and anyone involved in this milieu, including Isabela, a teenage cartel princess introduced beating the snot out of a disrespectful classmate and then not-so-subtly threatening her school headmaster when he voices interest in punishing her. Not content with one young monster, Day of the Soldado also trains its gaze on Miguel (Elijah Rodriguez), a young Mexican-American boy living in Texas who’s convinced by his criminal cousin to work as a member of his illicit migrant-smuggling venture.
Everything is corrupted in Day of the Soldado, including the nation’s youth, as Sheridan’s script exudes a cynicism that knows no bounds. Graver and Gillick are accomplished operatives thanks in large part to their no-nonsense belief that life is cruel and callous, and that the only way to confront it is with comparable cruelty and callousness. Nonetheless, no matter their ass-kicking aptitude, things go wrong for these antiheroic desperadoes long before they’ve completed their task. In its late twists, Sollima’s film truly plunges headfirst into harsh territory, where compassion, decency and loyalty are no match against greed, ruthlessness and the inescapable fact that “you gotta do what you gotta do,” no matter what ungodly thing that might actually be.
Mirroring the color-coded aesthetics of Villeneuve and cinematographer Roger Deakins’ maiden series entry, Sicario: Day of the Soldado (shot with intense, fluid urgency by Dariusz Wolski) radiates harshness in its every inky black and icy blue composition. Sollima’s orchestration of both Isabela’s abduction and a later desert siege, meanwhile, is rugged and harrowing. Just as unnerving are the performances of Brolin and del Toro, the former as an individual who cares only about the objective at hand, and the latter a once-righteous public servant transformed by tragedy into a killer. They’re men hardened into agents of destruction by experience and circumstance, and though a late surrogate-parental decision by Gillick complicates his relationship with his comrade (and our conception of him), it remains a faint sign of humanity amidst a sea of darkness.
Resurrection and damnation eventually arrive (in somewhat crazy forms), but as Graver and Gillick head toward distant horizons, hope proves in short supply—as does any meaningful change, which as Graver’s boss Cynthia Foards (Catherine Keener) articulates, was never a goal of this cartel battle in the first place. In their place, Sollima’s electric film offers acknowledgment of our desolate new world order, in which force responds to force, futility is omnipresent, and tomorrow seems destined to be no less hellish than today—unless, as Gillick shows, one learns to turn the other cheek for the good of current, and future, generations.
