Sicario: Day of the Soldado is what you get if you have someone who either didn’t watch Sicario, but saw clips and thought Benicio Del Toro was cool, or saw Sicario and completely missed the point of the story, particularly the emotional psychological trajectory. It is dreadful, a waste of time and money, and even if you like mindless action, it ultimately lets you down on that level too. I’m going to discuss both movies in the spoilers, not just the second. If you have seen this movie, please feel free to comment if you have answers to the questions that I raise. If you haven’t seen Sicario, don’t read the following because it is a good movie that is psychologically disturbing and extremely violent, and a movie review shouldn’t ruin the genuine surprises of that story, but if you saw Sicario or have no interest in Sicario, then please feel free to keep reading because maybe if you spoil Sicario: Day of the Soldado, go against my advice and see it, the movie will infuriate you less.
S
P
O
I
L
E
R
S
In Sicario, the movie primarily follows Emily Blunt’s character, a FBI agent, as she becomes part of a crew of various law enforcement government agencies then realizes that they are operating outside of the law led by a CIA agent played by Josh Brolin, who is making all the money this summer in Sicario: Day of the Soldado, Deadpool 2 and Avengers: Infinity War. Del Toro plays a mysterious figure that does not belong to any part of the US government, and his role gradually grows as the movie unfolds. He used to be a lawyer, but joined a Colombian cartel to get revenge for the murder of his family, which sounds cheesy. It is a real shocker when you watch the first movie because he is such a gentle person whom you can easily imagine adhering to rules, but is actually brutal and will kill anyone, fathers, women and children, to get revenge. US’ allegiance with him showed a particularly cynical approach to administration of government: illegal, immoral and transgressive. It was not the kind of movie that you could really root for revenge or see the efficient guys carrying the guns as the good guys because they weren’t. There was a real likelihood that they would have killed Blunt’s character.
Sicario: Day of the Soldado completely misses that point. It felt like the filmmakers thought the border caravan ambush scene was really cool, wanted to do a version of it, thought Brolin’s crew was really badass and wanted to spend more time with them and wanted to make Del Toro’s character into Terminator 2, but human. Sadly even the story that they made did not make sense. It is like a Presidon’t fever dream of what brown people do along the border with a dash of international thriller.
Sicario: Day of the Soldado begins with people being smuggled along the border by cartels. Cue Islamaphobia as one of the migrants turns out to be a terrorist complete with the prayer rug and everything. He blows himself up then cut to the store that isn’t Target where the three that got away immediately visit because hitting landmarks is so early 21st century. A woman and her daughter slowly approach the last one who is blocking the exit instead of running for the exit or the opposite way to make us feel extra angry at the human bombs. The only grown ass woman with lines, Catherine Keener, works for the US government and brings Brolin back in to do some extralegal, i.e. illegal, crap. He goes to a country in Africa that begins with the letter S because at some point, we need some bad black guys and starts killing a smuggler’s family off with drones until he reveals how the terrorists got smuggled from the Middle East to Mexico because they couldn’t fly. Brolin gets Del Toro because it involves one of the guys who killed his family. At this point, my friends and I say, “Huh? But he got them.” OK, whatever, sure. We are willing to pretend that in the first movie his character was not on a relentless search to kill everyone who killed his family and left one behind because reasons: sequel, money, squirrel. This little meeting is actually pretty good with the nice touch that Del Toro’s character does not celebrate Christmas BECAUSE HE BELIEVES IN NOTHING REMEMBER!!!!!
The plan is to get the cartels to turn on each other. If you saw the trailer, this is when we see the scene when Del Toro turns a gun into an automatic and shoots a guy repeatedly. I hope that you enjoyed it because it is his coolest moment in the film. The next step is to kidnap a little girl, but not just any little girl, the daughter of a big cartel drug lord, and pretend that the opposing cartel kidnapped her looking for revenge. They find her father, who has men in the police force, by tracing the call, but I don’t think that they ever follow up on this thread—please let me know if I missed it. It just kind of evaporates. They bring the girl back to the US and go through an elaborate scheme to make her think that DEA agents rescued her. The only other grown ass woman character never gets a line and baby sits while inwardly cursing out her superiors for using her training this way. They decide to return the girl to Mexico, but it is unclear whether they will stash her away for leverage or return her home. Please let me know if this moment was actually clear, and I missed it, or the movie just didn’t care. I actually feel like this point is important to explain Del Toro’s subsequent motivations.
I got momentarily confused at this moment. I thought that the Mexican official talking to Brolin was maybe the same guy that knew Del Toro’s character after they kidnap and before they torture the guy that they kidnapped in the first movie because I wondered why they were so friendly and trusted him. Is it the same guy or not? At any rate, Brolin’s character must be going senile because he forgot that he didn’t trust the Federal Mexican Police in the first movie and cue caravan ambush scene. American team kills the Federal Mexican Police, the girl runs away, and Del Toro goes after her with Brolin’s blessing. Brolin goes home, and Keener says kill everyone, the girl and Del Toro included! No one can know that the US killed Mexican officials because then it is an international incident, POTUS will get impeached, and side note, the suicide bombers are American. Oops! Brolin clutches his pearls at the idea of losing Del Toro because he is such a valuable asset. At this point, I thought that since the whole movie was going off the rails, it would have been interesting if Brolin played a hand in Del Toro’s family’s death to make him into an asset to introduce some tension then Del Toro could go John Wick on the US, but in spite of everyone tossing around how hard it is to “make” an asset, this goes no where.
Naturally Del Toro finds the girl, and they stay at a deaf family’s home, which gives us the detail that his daughter was deaf, he knows sign language so he isn’t actually a bad guy, ok! Um, I saw the first movie so no. Incidentally because the wife/mom is also deaf, she is the second grown ass woman without lines in this movie. Unlike her husband, she doesn’t even sign. She just holds a baby. It is utter bullshit.
The girl knows who Del Toro is because he is a legend. Shrug. I can accept it and take my pen to sign a waiver. She also knows that means that he wants to kill her dad. If you know him, then you also know that he doesn’t just kill the dad, but the whole family in front of the dad. I concede that she doesn’t have much choice but to trust him because her other options are warring cartels kidnapping her, and maybe she saw The Counselor and didn’t want to be baby Penelope Cruz. Brolin breaks the bad news to Del Toro that he and the girl have a death sentence hanging over their head. Del Toro won’t allow it! Wait, what?!? Unfortunately for me as a viewer, I didn’t buy it. WHY? The last person who reminded him of his daughter, Emily Blunt, that he liked, he shot her in the bulletproof vest and was going to kill her if she didn’t participate in a cover up. He kills women and children!
He decides to smuggle the girl back to the US and places a tracing device in her boot so the Americans can track her. Wait, WHAT?!! But the US wants her dead! At some point, someone casually mentions that her mother is in the US. I’m not sure if this was a lie or the truth because it comes out of nowhere. Please let me know if you know the deal with her mother because maybe I missed it or misunderstood it. If the US decided that the girl needed to die, I don’t see how bringing her back to the US helps matters! They’ll just kill her and her mother. You’re basically bringing her to the execution chamber. Why not back to her family in Mexico? Sure, it is harder, and they would probably try to kill Del Toro because he is a threat, but if he suddenly decided to be self-sacrificial and protect the girl, why not? This movie is now dumber than dirt and makes no sense. It is also long and not over.
What I neglected to mention earlier is that like Sicario, when we are not focusing on the characters from the first movie, we have been following around a random person and are unclear how he will become part of the larger story. Unlike the first movie, this narrative device does not humanize the targets of the Americans so we think of them as part of the tragedy. In Sicario: Day of the Soldado, all brown people are suspects so we are stuck following some Mexican American teenager and his older cousin who smuggle people and work with a Mexican cartel. There is not one single good brown or black person who even appears silently in the background other than the deaf family! At one point in the movie, in Texas, he encounters the American team so he remembers Del Toro when he tries to pretend to be the tallest, biggest nobody with his daughter to get smuggled across the border. The smugglers yoke up Del Toro and the girl who has been kidnapped multiple times in the last twenty-four hour. They cover her face with duct tape so how is she breathing and how does it not rip her face clean off when they eventually take it off? They know that Del Toro is shady because he has a gun, but it is unclear if THEY KNOW WHO HE IS or they just want the valuable target, i.e. the girl, for themselves or if they are enemies of her dad’s cartel. While I wish this aspect of the story were clearer, I’m also fine with the ambiguity because either way, it results in the same way: they decide to kill him and take the girl.
When they cover his face with a burlap sack and duct tape, I kind of shrugged. You live by the kidnapping, you die by the kidnapping. Them’s the breaks! Because Sicario is supposed to be somewhat realistic, he isn’t able to break free and get the upper hand! He gets shot in the head! For a second, I wondered if there was going to be a reveal of a bait and switch, and it wasn’t actually Del Toro who got shot because I couldn’t believe that filmmakers that were so desperate to make Sicario into a franchise would then kill Del Toro! I began to get impressed because while it was not as textured as the original, and the movie was still dumb to reach this point in the manner that they did, Sicario: Day of the Soldado would still be bad ass for showing that on some level, they were still willing to do anything.
The random Mexican American kid shoots him after the first random kid chosen to execute Del Toro balks and gets shot in the head by their boss for not obeying orders. Random Mexican American kid later takes off from the group because he isn’t about that life. I am puzzled why the head of the smugglers doesn’t demand that his cousin stop the car to kill him, but just allows him to take off on foot in the middle of the desert far away from the border. He really doesn’t seem to be a guy that is cool if you quit with notice. Well, good decision kid, because the Americans arrive and kill all the smugglers, BUT NOT THE GIRL WHOM THEY DECIDE TO PUT IN WITNESS PROTECTION! WHAT WITNESS PROTECTION? THE AMERICAN FEDERAL GOVERNMENT WANTS TO KILL HER SO THE AMERICAN FEDERAL GOVERNMENT WON’T PUT HER IN WITNESS PROTECTION?!? ARE THEY GOING TO GIVE HER TO MEXICAN FEDERAL WITNESS PROTECTION BECAUSE THAT IS THE ONLY THING THAT MAKES SENSE BECAUSE A WITNESS TESTIFIES IN TRIALS!?! WHEN DID THESE PEOPLE STOP KILLING KIDS? WHAT IS SO SPECIAL ABOUT THIS GIRL? The Americans are sad about what happened to Del Toro (they watched from a drone), but are relieved that they didn’t have to do it themselves because orders, WHICH THEY IGNORED FOR THE GIRL!!!!! Sicario: Day of the Soldado neutered these guys! They are supposed to have NO BOUNDARIES!
Meanwhile Del Toro survives getting SHOT POINT BLANK IN THE FUCKING FACE! At this point, I lose all respect for the movie, and my friends and I are openly, loudly laughing because it is dumb. Another audience member leaves the theater because the scene is gross. Other audience members are annoyed at us for making so much noise because this movie is awesome, and we are clearly wrong that Sicario: Day of the Soldado is the worst movie of 2018! Apparently when the Americans ambushed the smugglers in the day, they didn’t drive that far away from where they shot him the previous night because he shuffles over, finds their car and barely drives off. There is a cool moment when he is attacked while driving away, and they miss shooting him, but he casually tosses a grenade in their car while suffering from a TRAUMATIC HEAD WOUND!
The final scene takes place a year later. We’re back in the mall with the Mexican American teenager who is covered with tattoos, but still shady just on the US side of the border. He opens the door and instead of the guy who normally chats on the phone while working, Del Toro tries out his James Bond impression by saying something like, “So you want to be a Sicario?” If a sicario recruitment program existed, this kid wouldn’t make the cut because he failed, and he quit when he thought that he murdered a man! Also we know from Sicario that like most people, Del Toro doesn’t like it when people point a gun at him, but unlike most people, he will shoot you, not try to recruit you!
It becomes obvious that the writers probably had this scene in mind first when they made the whole movie. Kingsman called, and they want their plot line back. In Sicario, I don’t remember anyone referring to Del Toro’s character as sicario, but now because they want to make a franchise, Sicario: Day of the Soldado makes it a thing. I don’t know how Del Toro transformed from family man into lawyer. I’m not saying that I wouldn’t watch a prequel if we’re really going to pretend there was a training program to become an assassin because I would. I just wouldn’t watch that prequel if the same people who made Sicario: Day of the Soldado were hired to make the prequel because this movie was dreckitude. Do not watch it!