Movie Info
Movie Info
- Director
- Stefano Sollima
- Run Time
- 2 hours and 2 minutes
- Rating
- R
VP Content Ratings
- Violence
- 8/10
- Language
- 4/10
- Sex & Nudity
- 1/10
- Star Rating
Relevant Quotes
You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.
Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.’
Director Stefano Sollima, working with screenwriter Taylor Sheridan, take up the Sicario story some three years after the first film. The film opens at night near the U.S.-Mexican border where US agents are in the act of arresting a group of migrants when one of them sets off a bomb. At the same time in Kansas City four men enter a large store and kill many shoppers with their suicide bombs. The U.S. authorities respond with tactics that seem little different from those on the other side of the law.
CIA Agent Matt Graver (Josh Brolin), having been given permission by no less a man than the Sec. of Defense, eventually teams up again with former ‘Sicario’ Alejandro Gillick (Benicio Del Toro). Their plan is to start a war among the Mexican drug cartel lords by kidnapping the daughter of one of them and making him think it was a rival who is holding her hostage. Naturally, there are unforeseen happenings that turn the two men against each other when matters are so bad that the girl is ordered to be terminated. There is also a young Mexican American teenager who gets caught up in the drug smuggling who will cross paths with Alejandro at the end of the film, leading us to expect a third Sicario film.
Action lovers will take to this film, and those of us concerned about the deterioration of the War on Drugs will also find the film of interest. We expect ruthless drug lords to use “any means necessary” to obtain the vast wealth that drug sales in the U.S. generate. But when the forces of law and order decide to resort to similar measures, it is a different matter. And when one of “the good guys” uses the war to pay back the killers of his family, he too crosses over a line, with little chance to return to the side of righteousness. At the end of this film I thought of the closing scene of George Orwell’s fable Animal Farm, in which their leader, a pig aptly named Napoleon, is transacting business with a human and because Napoleon has continually adopted the ways of humans, they cannot tell the difference between them.
This review with a set of discussion questions will be in the August 2018 issue of Visual Parables.
