Sicario: Day of the Soldado

Sicario - Day of the Soldado (2018) is a nihilistic thriller set on the Mexican border near Corpus Christi.  The movie endorses every vicious calumny about Mexicans and our allegedly deadly border -- it's an example of a Hollywood film that could have been scripted by Donald Trump (if Donald Trump were literate); that is, an example of "American carnage" caused by disloyal Americans and Mexican drug cartels on a border that imports crime into our innocent nation. Unfortunately, the film is also very effectively made and compelling.  It's an example of Fascist or quasi-Fascist art, a picture that would be much better if shot as a silent film (the dialogue is meretricious and absurd).  The director holds the camera steady, uses lucid set-ups for his action sequences, and convincingly establishes realistic settings for the mayhem that the film features.  (Anyone who has traveled in Mexico will have noticed how people signal to one another with laconic, semi-articulate whistles -- the movie shows us this detail and a thousand others that create the illusion that we are watching a realistic movie, even (and this is worse given the content) something like a documentary.)  The film is grim from its first shot to its final, nightmarish conclusion but, at least, the director is in control of movie's tone and the picture expresses something -- although I am profoundly skeptical about most of what the film professes. 

I would guess that this picture is not exactly boffo at the box office given the current situation on the Southern border.  It's disturbing but the film is weirdly congruent with American policy.  We have all seen images of children separated from their parents at the border -- in effect, kidnaped by American authorities.  Let me correct that statement -- we all think we have seen such images; in fact, the Border Patrol and ICE have not allowed any such pictures to evade their grasp.  But we have heard children crying, seen images of toddlers apparently about to be seized, and so by the alchemy of mass media, we all think that we are electronic witnesses to this practice. Sicario/Soldado features a plot involving burly American soldiers kidnaping a little Mexican girl.  (She's the daughter of a drug lord, but, the film is pretty clear:  American policy requires the child to be forcibly separated from those who care for her.)  This is more than a little disturbing and gets even worse when the U.S. bureaucrats at the Border, for inscrutable reasons, demand that the child be "cleaned" -- that is, that she and everyone around her be murdered, that is, "disappeared" like many of the hapless kids snatched from their parents at ICE detention centers. The film also makes a curious reference to the situation in the Middle East.  Some Muslim terrorists attack a K-Mart in Kansas City and kill a bunch of people with their suicide bombs.  So how does the United States respond?  By attacking Mexico.  This is similar to the aftermath of 9-11 -- two planes piloted by Saudi Arabian nationals crashed into the Twin Towers and, so, what did the geniuses at the State Department do? -- they invaded Afghanistan, a country that had little or nothing to  do with the attack.  Of course, the consequences of these actions have been disastrous and Sicario/Soldado likewise shows that American military policy responsive to terror attacks is downright moronic and, indeed, leads to a panoply of unintended consequences.

Sicario/Soldado begins with a sequence showing migrants swarming across the border at night.  The migrants are detained and, bizarrely, one of them has a suicide vest that he detonates after muttering some vaguely Islamic-sounding phrases.  (This sequence exactly supports Donald Trump's assertion that the southern border is porous to vicious terrorists -- in this case, Muslim extremists.)  Some suicide bombers attack a Walmart.  This leads the U.S. secret forces, some sort of clandestine top-secret anti-terrorist force led by the thuggish Josh Brolin to invade Mexico.  (The plot isn't exactly clear why this is a good idea).  The clandestine special forces troops seize the daughter of a drug cartel lord.  They smuggle her across the border -- why?  (There's some half-assed dialogue explaining this but no one seems to believe it).  Then, the idiot special forces operatives decide to smuggle the little girl back into Mexico.  Furthermore, the special forces incompetents decide that it's a good idea to recruit the Mexican Federales to support this operation.  Of course, everyone who has a Fodors guide to Mexico knows that the Federales "have a sinister reputation" -- I'm quoting a guidebook -- and can't exactly be relied-upon in all circumstances.  The Federales, of course, attack the special forces troops, but being mere Mexicans are unable to withstand the superior firepower of the Anglos and get shot dead to the last man.  (No casualties on our side).  The little girl runs away and a Mexican attorney (he's traveling with the Special Forces for inscrutable reasons) is left in the desert to track down the child and get her across the border again.  (Why she is ping-ponging across this dangerous border is anyone's guess.)  Meanwhile back in Corpus Christi, it turns out that the three suicide bombers at the K-Mart were from New Jersey and didn't cross the border from Mexico.  This, as they say, changes the narrative and so the powers that be order that the little girl and everyone associated with her be slaughtered.  So our Special Forces again invade Mexico led by Josh Brolin who is suppose to kill his best friend and the little girl -- really, not a very good plan but par for the course since the film inadvertently shows the Americans as being completely feckless.  So a lot more people get killed.  These elements in the film are vehemently anti-immigrant and ridiculously anti-Mexican -- it's astounding to me that Hollywood types are so wildly hypocritical as to attack President Trump for his policies when, in fact, this whole movie seems designed to endorse the most primitive and vicious aspects of his platform.  There's a subplot involving an American latino kid, apparently an eighth-grader, who gets recruited by the coyotes and works smuggling people across the border.  This plot also involves lots of casual murder.  The kid shoots the Mexican lawyer but inaccurately and, a year later, the lawyer shows up at a Food  Court in Corpus Christi.  The little Hispanic kid has burning eyes and, now, seems one of the utterly damned.  The lawyer, whose face is mutilated by the bullet he took in his cheek, confronts the kid, asks him if he really wants to be a sicario (assassin) and, then, shuts the door to the back room of a burger place, shutting out the camera while  inviting us to hope for another sequel in this nasty series of films.

For what it's worth, this creepy saga is well-acted.  Catherine Keener plays a hardened special forces operator who blithely orders the film's various massacres.  Matthew Modine impersonates the U. S. secretary of defense -- he's all bluster, but compelling enough.  Benitez del Toro plays the sympathetic Mexican attorney whose family was slaughtered by the little girl's papa and his drug cartel (in the preceding, equally nihilistic film).  He also exudes an aura of complete damnation.  The weakness in the film is the loathsome Josh Brolin.  He's a complete cipher, squinting his little porcine eyes at the camera:  he has a Bob Hope ski-jump nose and a Fred Flintstone jaw and he broods and snarls throughout the film.  The director seems in love with him and, in one extended sequence, he marches toward the camera, apparently with a large rod rammed up his ass.  The director uses  him shrewdly -- we're never sure whether he's supposed to be a good guy, a very stupid good guy, or a bad guy.