There’s a
scene in the middle of this film where Benicio Del Toro’s
lawyer-turned-exterminator Alejandro is staggering across a Mexican wasteland
trying to find a place to hide out. Actually, that happens a couple of times:
it’s just that kind of film. But the first time it happens he stumbles across a
humble Mexican shack-dweller who, together with his wife, happens to be deaf.
Fortunately it turns out Alejandro knows sign language, so after a rest and a
quick hand-chat about “different worlds” (the shack-dweller’s baby isn’t deaf), the
film moves on.
You’d be
forgiven for thinking this ominous but otherwise pointless scene is setting up a later
development where knowing sign language comes in handy, but no: the point of
this scene is to let us know that the only people in Mexico who aren’t corrupt
or criminal are deaf and living in a shack in the middle of nowhere, because
Mexico is literally Hell on Earth. Which, if you saw the first Sicario, isn’t much of a shock, but at
least then the idea was that Emily Blunt’s straight-laced cop was slowly
dropped into a meaningless nightmare; here it’s just nightmare all the way
through.
Fortunately
we have both Alejandro and Josh Brolin’s extreme US-issue badass Matt Graver to
impose some order south of the border – or at least, they would if only the
pen-pushers in Washington would get out of their way (it’s surprising Graver never says “I bet you had a good view of all the action from behind your desk”). If
you’ve ever wondered what a typical 80s action movie would look like if
everyone involved took it very, very seriously, this is your lucky day. It even
has a cute kid, in the form of Isabel (Isabela Moner) the daughter of an unseen
cartel boss who becomes the centre of Graver’s scheme to set the cartels at
each others’ throats.
This film's main attribute is a well-crafted tone of ultra-bleakness that it in no way comes close to earning. We’re expected to believe
that helping refugees find a better life is somehow a moral step down from drug
smuggling and murder while the plot bends over backwards to insure that
Alejandro – a character who’s sole attribute is that he’s burnt out all of his
humanity in his quest for revenge against the cartels that killed his family –
never actually does anything inhumane when it comes to his cross-continent
murder spree. Then again, everyone in Mexico works for the cartels so he’d
really have to search hard to find someone who didn’t deserve to die.
Still,
those 80s action movies were fun for a reason. This isn’t as suspenseful as the
first Sicario and it lacks some of
that film’s visual flair, but the script (from returning writer Taylor
Sheridan) serves up a number of tense sequences and enough moral murkiness to
keep the plot twists coming. Brolin and Del Toro are much better actors than
their cardboard characters deserve, providing some much-needed emotion (mostly sadness)
at the core of what are basically murder machines. More importantly, Jeffery
Donovan as Graver’s sidekick provides some vital porn moustache action.
This is an
entertaining, often gripping action B-movie let down by its inability to
decide whether it wants to be a searing indictment of… something… or just an
above-average cop thriller. It’s a film where a character is driving away from
the scene of a violent crime when a car coming the other way suddenly turns
around and comes after him guns blazing. It’s Mexico, so he tosses a grenade
into it; whether it was more cartel members or just regular Mexican drivers exploding
behind him seems beside the point.
- Anthony Morris
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