IN THEATRES: Sicario - Day of the Soldado

After a series of bombings lead the US government to designate the Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organisations, Matt Graver (Josh Brolin) is brought in to lead the campaign. Rather direct confrontation, his plan involves fermenting distrust between the various cartels so that they begin a war with each other.

As part of his strategy, he brings in 'sicario' (hit man) Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro) and a team of mercenaries to kidnap the daughter (Isabela Moner) of a major cartel leader.

Though the kidnapping is a success, it becomes obvious that the situation they have instigated may be beyond their abilities to control...

 

While it lacks the almost Lovecraftian dread of its predecessor, Soldado is a fine action drama that takes the world and the key supporting players of the first film (Del Toro and Brolin) in a new story that still feels of a piece with the original.

Whereas Denis Villeneuve's film was concerned with showing the labyrinthine, enigmatic and chaotic nature of America's War on Drugs, with Emily Blunt's protagonist as the audience surrogate.

Soldado is also about innocence corrupted - the film is built around two converging plotlines: the kidnapping of Isabela (Moner); and the initiation of a young man ( Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) working as a people smuggler along the border.

While the main focus is on Graver's scheme to start a gang war, the film is ultimately about the cycle of violence, and the recruitment of new soldado (soldiers) to carry on the bloodshed. This is encapsulated at the end of the movie, which features a pair of scenes in which our protagonists are forced to confront their own mirror images - seated opposite post-rescue, dead-eyed Isabela, Graver finds he is unable to maintain his own basilisk stare; meanwhile Alejandro meets with the former people smuggler, who wants to become a 'sicario'. 

Repeated references are made to Graver's past 'success' in the Middle East, and how the goal is to turn the cartels' turf into 'Afghanistan'. There is a dark joke in aligning one failed conflict (the War on Terror) to another (the War on Drugs), and this sense of context gives the film a sense of foreshadowing, as the viewer waits for the protagonists' plan to fall apart. 

One element of the original Sicario that returns here is the disjunction between narrative resolution and plot resolution. In typical action films, the resolution of the external conflict mirrors a personal resolution for the protagonist. It's an essential part of the catharsis we get from watching most action-driven narratives. Both Sicario and Soldado feature the main character accomplishing a specific goal that does not lead to a restoration of equilibrium in the diegesis; in the original, Alejandro kills the head of the cartel and his entire family, yet the movie does not signal any broader geopolitical shift. Life goes on, along with the violence. 

In Soldado, this central action sequence takes place about halfway through the movie, when Graver, Alejandro and their team are ambushed by Mexican police while trying to bring the girl back to Mexico. Though their adversaries are killed, the girl and Alejandro are left behind in the desert, while the government terminates Graver's campaign due to the broader political repercussions of a US strike team killing Mexican cops in Mexico. In the world of Soldado, action is not so much propulsive as it is retroactive, destroying any sense of order or sense of direction.

There are no rules in this movie's universe, and no way to adapt fully to them. All you can hope for is to survive.