Between them, director Denis Villeneuve and cinematographer Roger Deakins created a mesmerising sense of foreboding in the 2015 thriller, Sicario. Written by Taylor Sheridan, it presented a nightmarish landscape of violence on the border between the US and Mexico. There, Emily Blunt’s FBI agent Kate Macer provided the one flicker of decency in a drug war where humanity seemed in short supply.
Emily Blunt isn’t in Sicario 2: Soldado, which leaves us in far chillier company: US government operative Matt Graver (Josh Brolin) and his murderous assassin sidekick, Alejandro Gillick (Benicio del Toro). The pair were a secretive, almost unknowable presence in the first movie, but Soldado manages to deepen our understanding of them – even if their actions are likely to make us recoil in horror.
With director Stefano Sollima and photographer Dariusz Wolski taking the helm, Sicario 2 has a markedly different pace and texture than the first: without Villeneuve’s feel for mood, Soldado feels less ethereal and more like a conventional crime thriller. All the same, Sollima – the Italian director of Suburra and several episodes of the Gomorrah TV series – has his own gritty way of building suspense.
The vital common factor between this film and the first is screenwriter Taylor Sheridan, who weaves another story about a seemingly endless cycle of bloodshed on the US border. This time, Sheridan turns his attention to human trafficking, with his multi-strand narrative straddling both sides of his subject.
Early on, we meet Miguel (Elijah Rodriguez) a teenager who’s being groomed by a Mexican crime boss into the migrant smuggling business: destitute families are relieved of a few hundred dollars, driven to the border by bus, then marched under cover of night across the line and onto American soil – assuming the Border Patrol cops don’t catch them first.
When a terrorist incident in Kansas City sparks a national outcry, and it’s suspected that the culprits entered the country via the US-Mexican border, the CIA formulates a murderous response: engineer a war between the cartels. To this end, Graver (Brolin) and Alejandro (del Toro) assemble a team of soldiers, kidnap the daughter of a powerful drug boss, then make the whole thing look like the crime of a rival cartel.
It’s the kind of crazy plan that doesn’t even sound like a good idea on paper, but thanks to the simmering intensity of the performances and Sollima’s direction when the whole gambit starts to fall apart, the movie still retains at least a thin patina of believability.
In essence, what Sheridan’s written is a modern, Tex-Mex western, not unlike Logan but without the superhero trappings: del Toro’s the weary, regret-filled gunslinger, capable of horrendous violence but also possessing a shred of morality that we never saw in Sicario. Here, the abducted daughter, Isabela (a very good Isabela Mona) provides him with a rare attack of conscience: even Alejandro realises that using a child as a pawn in a power struggle isn’t what you’d call a righteous thing to do.
Like its predecessor, Sicario 2 isn’t a subtle movie, but it’s certainly an absorbing one. Sollima captures the texture of his dusty, sun-parched locations, and his action set-pieces are efficient and bloodcurdling. Composer Hildur Guðnadóttir, who takes over from the late, sorely missed Jóhann Jóhannsson, provides an unsettling sonic backdrop to Soldado‘s already bleak saga.
Rating: Four stars out of five.
Sicario 2: Soldado is out in UK cinemas on the 29th June.
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