Sicario

A rare misfire from Denis Villeneuve, Sicario follows FBI agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) as she’s enlisted to join a team dedicated to finding and taking down a deadly Mexican drug cartel. Filmmaker Villeneuve, working from Taylor Sheridan’s screenplay, admittedly does a fantastic job of grabbing the viewer’s interest right from the get-go, as Sicario opens with a tense and thoroughly thrilling sequence involving a raid on a suspected kidnapper’s home – with the movie, immediately past that point, segueing into a dry, deliberately-paced midsection that never quite manages to achieve liftoff. The most obvious problem here is Sheridan’s persistent (and stubborn) refusal to offer up elements designed to lure the viewer into the narrative, with the lack of character development for any of the movie’s many figures compounded by a storyline that remains aggressively impenetrable from start to finish. It does, perhaps inevitably, go without saying that Sicario’s various action-oriented sequences, though incredibly well done, are unable to pack the visceral punch Villeneuve has surely intended, and there’s consequently little doubt that the director’s continuing efforts at creating anything even resembling momentum fall completely and hopelessly flat. The arms-length atmosphere is, to be fair, reflective of the central character’s state of mind – ie Kate often seems just as baffled as the viewer – but Villeneuve’s total disinterest in cultivating and maintaining a watchable (or even coherent) narrative is nothing short of infuriating. And although the movie closes with an absurdly over-the-top (and thoroughly entertaining) action set piece, Sicario is ultimately so obsessed with the minutia of its subject matter that it’s often as engrossing as a day at the office.

*1/2 out of ****