Sicario: Day of the Soldado

This is one of those action movies that it only job is to give you as real as possible experience with its beautiful cinematography. It doesn't feel as real as ''Children of Men'' and it probably won't get a Oscar but it serves its job. The movie may not be as masterful as Villeneuve's original, but it achieves to keep you on the screen. There are really good heart-pumping scenes that beautifully blended with the score in its convoluted plot. Just like in the first movie, the story gets darker and darker. It reflects real-life situations, that's why it's so dreary and compelling. All the events is a buildup to our main story. It all ties together perfectly in the end. And even though key cast member Emily Blunt no longer here, the movie stands alone as a powerful modern-day Western, thanks to the Josh Brolin, Benicio del Toro, and Taylor Sheridan who also penned the screenplay of the first movie.

I'll definitely watch this again.

Not as good the the first one but held my attention throughout. If you can bear the plot holes and just go with it then definitely worth a watch. Benicio as always is great to watch and most of the cast do a great job. I'd recommend it if you enjoyed the first one.

Where the original Sicario was carried by the suspence created by the contrasting naive FBI-agent Macy (Emily Blunt), the cynical CIA-agent Matt (Josh Brolin) and the vengeful Alejandro (Benicio del Toro) as ruthless sicario turned against the drug carlets operating along the US-Mexico border, the sequal lacks this tension and becomes an analogue and rather predictable story. Decent acting performances, and attempts to recreate the original dark athmosphere cannot save the weak plot, where several interesting issues launched at the start are not followed through. This makes for a rather unfulfilling experience, despite hints of another sequal.

Sicario 2: Soldado (released in North America as Sicario: Day of the Soldado) is a sequel to Denis Villeneuve's Sicario (2015). And if ever a film didn't scream "sequel", it was that one. Apart from the fact that it was only a modest box-office hit (grossing $84.9 million against a $30 million budget, in an era when the only films that become franchises must gross $800 billion in the first five minutes of their release), the storyline was carried to a fairly natural conclusion - Alejandro Gillick (Benicio Del Toro), protected by his CIA handler Matt Graver (Josh Brolin), successfully manipulated naïve and idealistic CIRG officer Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) into helping him exact revenge for the murder of his wife and daughter at the hands of drug baron Fausto Alarcón (Julio Cesar Cedillo). The film concluded with Graver getting what he wanted, Gillick getting revenge, and Macer in possession of a more realistic, if bitter, understanding of how the US conducts its affairs in Mexico.

A sequel felt wholly unnecessary. But a sequel is what we have. When a suicide bombing in Kansas kills fifteen people, the US government authorise Graver to adopt "extreme measures" to combat Mexican drug cartels, who are suspected of smuggling the terrorists across the border. Deciding to instigate a war between the two major cartels, Graver recruits Gillick to assassinate a high-profile lawyer for the Matamoros cartel while Graver and his team 'kidnap' Isabel Reyes (Isabela Merced), the daughter of the kingpin of Matamoros' rival. Taking her to Texas, Graver and Gillick then 'rescue' her in a false flag operation, making it appear she was kidnapped by her father's enemies. As they transport her back to Mexico, Gillick begins to bond with her. However, after they cross the border, the Mexican police escorts double-cross them, and Isabel flees into the desert, pursued by Gillick. Meanwhile, the US government determines that two of the suicide bombers from Kansas were domestic terrorists, and thus were not smuggled into the country. With this mind, to help quell tensions with Mexico, Secretary of Defense James RIley (Matthew Modine orders the CIA to abandon the mission, much to Garver's disgust.

With the first film wrapping up so neatly, the announcement of a sequel seemed like a typical Hollywood cash grab, one which would most likely crap all over the legacy of the truly excellent original. However, as bits and pieces of info regarding the sequel began to filter through, it started to feel less and less like the usual Hollywood knock-off we're all used to seeing. For starters, Taylor Sheridan would return as sole-writer, in a script that would not go in what, for many, might seem the only real direction in which to take the story - Macer getting revenge for Graver and Gillick using her. Instead, Macer wouldn't even appear, as the script would instead focus on pseudo-antagonists Gillick and Graver. To this end, the only other actors who would also return would be Raoul Max Trujillo as Rafael, one of Gillick's contacts in Mexico, and Jeffrey Donovan as Steve Foraing, Graver's number two. The big concern for a lot of people, however, was who would replace the irritatingly talented Villeneuve in the director's chair. And so it was another welcome bit of news when the man chosen was Stefano Sollima, the Italian director of A.C.A.B. - All Cops Are Bastards (2012) and Suburra (2015), as well as most of the episodes in the first season of Gomorrah (2014).

Okay, so first things first. Soldado isn't a patch on Sicario. Not even close (and, needless to say, there's nothing here to come anywhere near that dinner table scene). And there are some problems which were largely absent first time around. For example, the narrative suffers slightly from the absence of Macer, not insofar as she herself is irreplaceable, but more in the sense that the audience no longer has a surrogate. Because we know who Graver and Gillick really are this time around, there is obviously no point in the film playing its cards close to its chest, and so it adapts a more balls-to-the-wall, damn-the-torpedoes approach. This renders the narrative more morally simplistic than the first film. In tandem with this, perhaps wisely, Sheridan has written Soldado as a more conventional action-thriller than Sicario, but this has the knock-on effect that when the bullets start flying, as they do on several occasions, all the political/moral back-and-forth is made to seem nothing more than the material that gets us from one shootout to the next. Additionally, there's an element of repetition, as Isabel is traded off from one group to the next, and one definitely gets a sense of déjà vu, as she becomes a metaphorical cog in the screenwriter's machinery. Also, although Solima's direction is good (with that resume, how could he not get the gritty tone right), it's not as sharp as Villeneuve's. Finally, and this is a small point, the title of the film translates as Hitman 2: Soldier (or Hitman: Day of the Soldier in North America). This makes not a lick of sense, and instead sounds like a 90s action movie starring Michael Dudikoff.

However, for all that, I thoroughly enjoyed it. The script is sharp, relevant (references to a spineless POTUS undermining intelligence operations will be sure to please at least half the audience), gruff, and cool. With the two Sicario films, Hell or High Water (2016), Wind River (2017), and Yellowstone (2018), Sheridan is fast becoming one of Hollywood's most accomplished writers. The film also stars two of the coolest men on the planet being masculine and suppressing their emotions. Del Toro never so much as even hints at cracking a smile, whilst Brolin has lost some of the sardonic dismissiveness he possessed in the first film, but none of the bluster or self-confidence. All things considered, for a film that never seemed to have any real reason to exist, this is a cracking piece of storytelling, and has me already looking forward to the next instalment.

The first Sicario film was a surprise to me, and I enjoyed it for its slick thrills but also its darkness and twists and turns; like many I looked forward to the sequel - or rather, the next film, since this isn't really a sequel so much as a film with the same characters. The film places the characters into an unofficial war with the cartels where US forces try to engineer wars between the cartels to make them weaken and distract each other. This action is started due to terrorists being brought into the US as part of human smuggling run by the cartels - which gives the film an opening few minutes that matches the first film for impact.

From this very topical and heated place, the film actually plays out a fairly pedestrian plot that gets progressively smaller after a certain point. It delivers quite a few solid and slick sequences along the way, and mostly the impact of these carries the film. It isn't as good as it appears though, and the plotting doesn't really build - and it is disrupted by some very lazy writing where convenience keeps things going, no matter how unlikely it is. Such things do hurt the film, and took me out of the immersion I felt in the first film; in particular the ending I thought was pretty weak as a conclusion to this film, albeit opening it for the third film that we all knew was in the works before this one was even released.

The cast add to the sense of quality, and the performances are suitably tough and committed. The production standards are high, and it is easy to see the money and effort up there. It is just a shame that at its core, the writing is not as tough and engaging as everything else would have you believe. Still a solidly tense affair that is too slick to not be worth a look, but not as good as it seems.