When Sicario (2015) begins, we think it’s a movie about Emily Blunt’s character, badass FBI agent Kate Macer. In the opening minutes, she breeches a room, dodging a shotgun blast that would have taken off most of her head, and returns fire, cutting down her would-be killer. She’s the lead agent on a team specializing in kidnapping victims, but they don’t find any survivors in the cartel safehouse they just raided--only the putrid bodies of people who died horrible deaths and were interred standing up between the studs of the walls where you would normally find pink insulation. The movie doesn’t indicate if they were alive as the drywall went up.
After the bodies are found, Kate is recruited by a flip-flop-wearing CIA operative played by Josh Brolin. He needs an agent with tactical experience to take down the cartel leaders responsible for the murder house.
We’ve seen movies and TV shows like this, where an exceptional person or team is recruited for a mission. Like Spy Game (2001), where Robert Redford recruits Brad Pitt; Andor (2022), where Stellan Skarsgård recruits Diego Luna; The Color of Money (1986), where Paul Newman recruits Tom Cruise; Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), where Indy recruits his hard-drinking ex-girlfriend, Marion; Ocean’s 11 (2001), where George Clooney recruits more people than I care to name; and on and on. This is an eternal movie set-up.
We assume this movie will be no different from the other recruitment movies we’ve seen, that challenges exist only to make it more satisfying when the protagonist eventually leads the team to victory. We assume this because of our familiarity with recruitment movies and because, by the time Sicario came out, we already saw Emily Blunt in Edge of Tomorrow (2014) as Rita Vratski, the Angel of Verdun, who wields a fucking helicopter rotor blade as a sword. After seeing her action-hero bona fides in that and the opening minutes of Sicario, it's unfathomable to us that her character is not the hero of this movie.
Maybe another reason we’re so certain Emily Blunt will be the hero is because we’re a little bit racist. Although Blunt is famously British (she was Mary Poppins, a character that rivals 007 for Britishness), she plays an American character. Alejandro, a Colombian character played by Benicio del Toro, sidelines Kate Macer at the moment we think she’s finally ready to take over the helm of the movie. Alejandro is the titular sicario, which the movie's prologue explains is the term for a hitman in Mexico. Yet, we cannot comprehend what is happening. It’s as shocking as if the Chinese acrobat from Ocean’s 11 took over Clooney’s heist gang or the fez-wearing Arab guy in Raiders of the Lost Ark beat the Nazis and then made an honest woman out of Marion.
Kate Macer’s role in the movie is to sign a form and shut up. When future generations of what is left of America watch Sicario, this might not seem so odd to them. Perhaps they will immediately grasp the movie. Happy Fourth of July.
Sicario
Written by Taylor Sheridan; Directed by Denis Villeneuve
2015
121 minutes
English, Spanish, Ukrainian (I didn’t catch it, but this is what IMDb says)
Recommended way to watch (at time of publication): Netflix
You’ll like this if you like: Traffic (2000)