SICARIO by denis villeneuve, starring emily blunt, benicio del toro and josh brolin

rewatching this right after rewatching NCFOM. Compare and contrast!

Benicio Del Toro, Jeffrey Donovan and Josh Brolin all together, and no funnies = this film is just a little tiny bit up its own ass

I watched it for the first time a few weeks ago & was really impressed. Not at all what I expected - none of the usual exposition-heavy handholding/narration etc. I enjoyed it, super-tense, beautifully shot

The convoy scenes going in & coming out were so good

Brolin kinsa nailed the whole "spook" steez & attitude, right down to the flip flops lol

*kinda

I think that steez is a little bit overcooked in movies because the only spooks that hollywood guys consult with are retired yaga-yagas who tend to exaggerate their careers to bank fees

btw I'm glad we still say "steez" aren't you?

but in terms of the hollywood idea of a "spook" he did a good job

it would be a pretty boring role for anyone to play if it wasn't kinda overcooked imo

somewhere in between the high-strung obsessives trying to catch Jason Bourne and the retired SOCOM guys in flip flops is a boring person competently doing office work with ~25% travel

i'm enjoying jeffrey donovan's post-'burn notice' career, seems to play a lot of kennedys

xpost exactly. suburban-looking normcore

Benicio still brought some funnies to this, didn't he?

i don't know what the deal was with the wet willie torture of bernthal but i appreciated its use

I hate this fucking movie lol

i really liked this. i loved the twist that i only realized toward the end that the main character of the movie is not the "hero" at all. she kinda sucks at her job! it's totally not about her. i thought that was pretty cool. they do a good job of making you think that she matters and she doesn't matter AT ALL. that felt novel to me.

I watched this on a flight back from ireland last month and thought it was great but then a friend told me theres something about watching stuff at atmosphere that makes you like it more?

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/10/why-we-cry-on-planes/280143/

explains why interstellar made me cry.. stupid ass movie playing me like a fiddle!

Doesn't fuckin work on toddlers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pymm6cmE9uQ

Brolin least interesting thing in first one but hell yes I'll see this

I don't know that it needed a sequel.

looks like it maintains the Villeneuve style. I agree w/Brolin assessment but I think he was certainly good, his charisma gets him a long way in that type of role. Stefano Sollima directed this, he also directed the film version of Suburra.

wondering if Sheridan has a trilogy in mind, i'd be down for that.

2icario

A coworker said something about not needing more Sicario after he mentioned liking Villeneuve’s last few films and I thought he meant rewatching it. I had no clue whatsoever a sequel was being made. I guess we might get more Benicio, who was uh actually the title character in the first, now that I think about it?

SICARIO sucked.

yea I thought it was booooooooooring

Sicario wasn't awful, but the only way I'd care about a sequel would be if it was directed by John Hyams (the dude behind the DTV Universal Soldier sequels).

i would be down for sequel if it’s at the same quality level.

i loved Sicario

It didn't hang together at all but there were two or three scenes that were among the best of the year imo

agreed. it just didn't amount to anything, i felt

whoa just like the war on drugs 🤔🤔🤔

ha i thought you meant the band for a second and thought 'wait theres nothing good about them'

i welcome the balearic bits of the war on drugs tbh

DEA agents pursuing tanned drug lords across a breezy beach etc

the images and sound together were amazing but as a film, it’s among the many where the dynamic of being human seems by-the-numbers and not evocative of actual human experience or feeling

maybe that’s what it feels like to be an agent in the drug war, but even the character who is our entry point seems somewhat forced.

on the other hand, divorced from the dynamic of relating to normal people could benefit the sequel, an experience not attempting to relate to the average person but showing the detachment from people who appear at the other end of a gun

I've been saying this before, but Mexican filmmakers has made so many good films about the drug war that I don't really need an American/Canadian film which doesn't get any details right and doesn't make sense.

Villeneuve should not make political films (Polytechnique and Incendies are pretty bad as well) but luckily he isn't doing that anymore. He does have his strengths, no doubt about it.

yeah he can bench 450lbs iirc

I liked Incendies for its mythical qualities; I daren't take it seriously as political commentary. I prefer the weirder, cheaper end of his stuff (Maelstrom, Enemy)

i still think that emily blunt was one of the best macguffins i've ever seen in a movie. the film, ultimately, had nothing to do with her. i thought that was so cool! this movie was trickier than you might think. i'd watch it again. don't have high hopes for a sequel but i'd watch it on hulu or netflix.

I feel like a bad person for wanting it, but

SICARIO 2: SOLDADO by stefano sollima, starring catherine keener, benicio del toro, and josh brolin

somehow appeals to me. somehow they made the sequel title even more blunt (no emily, though)

its a video game adaptation without bothering with the video game first

seems like the new director's a decent fit, pretty good cinematographer pick, and imdb's claiming the music is Hildur Guðnadóttir, who worked with Johannsen on a lot of his good soundtracks, so my fingers are crossed

all we can really know for sure is Benicio del Toro will shoot some guys

by gad its enough

I can't see sicario anymore without recreating the ridiculous "that's chappie" twitter joke

benicio shows up on the airplane at the beginning, I lean to the side and whisper "he's the sicario"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIMChzE_aCo

so they mashed up Logan and Sicario huh

Wrote some of this on the general films thread: I saw Sicario 2 a couple nights ago and I thought it was solid but definitely a little less heightened and odd and mysterious than the first one. Stefano Sollima is good, but the film is definitely closer to Clear and Present Danger in terms of craft and style and even story: lots of government intrigue and failed missions leading to abandoning your people behind enemy lines shit.

The drawback w/having no Emily Blunt is you gotta turn your amoral characters w/murky motives into more moral dudes who question their mission. This isn’t necessarily a drawback but it makes this one a bit cleaner and more black and white than the first.

Del Toro and Brolin are both extremely good, the latter actually in particular. The story is just weirdly paced and as I said in the other thread the gov’t intrigue w/Matthew Modine and Catherine Keener just feels boilerplate.

The action scenes are extremely effective and the central ambush is tense.

If you did not like Sicario I’d say avoid this one though.

started poorly with chud-bait ‘zomg radical islamist terrorists are crossing the border disguised as mexican immigrants!’ bullshit, went steadily downhill from there in a miasma of sour machismo until it briefly looked like they had the guts to kill off benicio in a startlingly unglamorous and perfunctory way, then continued its downhill movement when it transpired that they did not

the first movie was bad, this one is bad and deeply unpleasant

I don’t think the writer thought through the terrorism angle, i guess the dude in the beginning was supposed to be unrelated to the dudes in the store attack? The latter group was from Jersey iirc? It didn’t make sense.

Also i don’t think a mom would do what the mom in the store attack scene did...

xpost. Agreed. Just an unpleasant, unnecessary flick.

the thing that really bugs me about these movies is that they're every bit as comic-booky and ridiculous as a rambo flick but we're expected to view it as something more than an excuse for people getting shot in interesting ways because it's draped in this oppressive olive-drab seriousness where everyone is a morally grey special operative who understands how to hold their weapon for maximum tactical awesomeness

benicio's back story is that he's a mild-mannered lawyer who somehow becomes the world's greatest killing machine after his family is murdered - we're never (iirc) told how this happens

he might as well have been bitten by a radioactive sniper scope for all the attention the movie gives to his transformation ffs