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

oh dear

I saw this, loved the cinematography and the soundtrack. The performances of the three main characters were also very good. But it feels like something is missing. I can't really name any specific flaws to this movie but somehow I came out of it unimpressed. I remember feeling the same way about Prisoners.

I guess it's the way everything gets wrapped up so neatly, a movie in this kind of setting should be more chaotic.

yeah i think that whole post is otm.

there are a few very effective scenes but in a weird way it's almost as if everything gets explained too much.

feels like a missed opportunity, and i wish more of it had been set in juarez.

also im kinda over movies and other media that portray the US intelligence apparatus as somehow all-knowing and in total command of their actions--the real horror would be realizing that they dont know what the fuck they are doing.

which was the case for most of the Cold War, coming to head during Watergate.

it's p clear they still don't know what the fuck they're doing

also im kinda over movies and other media that portray the US intelligence apparatus as somehow all-knowing and in total command of their actions--the real horror would be realizing that they dont know what the fuck they are doing.

― ryan, Friday, October 2, 2015 1:33 PM (22 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

idk isn't the whole point of this flick that what the FBI-DEA-black ops squad is doing is ultimately counterproductive/has nothing to do with justifiable law enforcement practices? that seems to be the vibe even in the trailers. but i'll know when i see it tonight or tomorrow i suppose

it was written by this dude, who bailed on Sons of Anarchy to perhaps focus on writing and not being on terrible tv shows.

http://41.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m91of5NlYy1rpat8ho1_500.jpg

no that totally is the point! it's not really a criticism of the movie but I tend to think the larger public isn't really challenged by those ideas. they expect, maybe even want, for the government to be willing to fudge the rules in the interest of "security." so it's a bit of cake having and eating too when films portray such organizations as shady but nearly omnipotent. feels more like a covert worship of power than a critique of it. just a vibe I get.

well yea thats the eternal debate over bigelow's last two flicks. personally i do think you can depict the viciousness and moral quandaries of deeds done by governments on film without endorsing them by simple virtue of creating that depiction, but many things try and fail.

along similar lines of sicario's subject matter, i think the show NARCOS does a good job of depiction-not-endorsement, often in intentional opposition to the line of thinking its american narrator is occasionally pushing

yeah i dont want to say "depiction is endorsement"--i guess what im saying (poorly) is that movies like this misjudge what it is they think they are depicting: it's not an outlaw security state but one operating exactly as its supposed to and with the tacit endorsement of the public.

probably impossible to talk about this more in depth until more people have seen the movie, but the revelation about a particular character would have been so much cooler if we were left to infer it rather than having another character walk us through it.

saw this last night and don't have a ton of ready #analysis bc I'm still overwhelmed and drained by it

I think it is saying that these government operations take place with the tacit support (typically via ignorance) of the public, and that these war-of-attrition back and forth escalations will continue on both sides as long as drugs are viewed as a battleground rather than a public issue (although obviously there's no mouthpiece character to voice the potential solution of legalization/treatment, bc even the best-intentioned characters here think enforcement can be accomplished in an above-board manner)

*public health issue

someone send me a copy of the cartel so i don't have to buy the gd hardback thanks

The catch-all justification for this kind of voyeuristic, seen-through-our-fingers tourism is that “this is the way it is,” which is also the rationale for Matt and Alejandro—the mindset that when things are this bad, anything goes. But Sicario doesn’t truly get inside the mixture of despair and outrage that this situation invites. Instead, the film exploits it, and leaves beautiful, befuddled Emily Blunt hypnotized by it, a stand-in for viewers who presumably want their eyes opened to the abject aspects of the drug war, and, if possible, widened in vicarious excitement. Sicario gives us plenty to look at, and yet the only thing it really illustrates is how hackneyed its maker’s motivations really are. Villeneuve is a terrific director—a youngish master. He may also be a genuine, mercenary sell-out before his time. This grimly beautiful movie is really very ugly.

http://reverseshot.org/reviews/entry/2098/sicario

"exploitative" in 2015 more often than not - "I think this movie has politics/worldviews I find ugly bc it depicts horrific situations as well as ppl whose worldviews about said situations are ugly and doesn't explicitly say 'this is horrible omg'"

ok that's a bit strong/an overly blanket statement on my part but like what do reviewers who object to movies like this in that matter actually want, some awkward third act stand against institutionalized militarized corruption?

i will say tho that the level of violence in ciudad juarez has dropped considerably since the 2008-2011 period of all-out slaughter - 2014 had over 400 homicides in stark contrast to the 1,900+ murders in 2011, for example. and the movie is depicting a world more in line with the 2008-2011 period.

Sicario gives us plenty to look at, and yet the only thing it really illustrates is how hackneyed its maker’s motivations really are. Villeneuve is a terrific director—a youngish master. He may also be a genuine, mercenary sell-out before his time. This grimly beautiful movie is really very ugly.

that's pretty much villeneuve's MO in his indie and mainstream films, wherever (or even if) you are inclined to draw the line between those two things.

honestly i feel similarly about the artier gus van sant, who is similarly peddling "important" topical subjects but really is just vampirishly depicting all manner of cruelty, martyrdom, etc. for shits n giggles.

i think Villeneuve is less of a serious blowhard than Van Sant, if for no other reason than that audience middle-finger ending to Enemy

Yes, I def prefer my vampirishly depicted cruelty w/out any important topical subject matters getting in the way

At least Van Sant's movies are shorter.

this was so boring. nothing happened

beautiful stupid movie sounds are amazing worth catching despite lines spoken by snoozing cast

this was a good, if unoriginal film, but i really hated how it seemed to basically just underline everything to do with drugs, cartels, and south america as 'you wont ever understand.. so why even bother?' or 'why should we even bother trying to help you make better sense of it? better instead to simply make you believe nothing makes sense and then you can just write it all off lazily and neatly'. so fuck this film for that. emily blunt was quite good though. del toro was also good though also irritatingly not really made much of until the end. it was an effective device, to have the audience as much in the dark as blunt and her partner, but the way they/us never really learnt anything i think, while good for a kind of sinister/foggy atmosphere, just leant to something that was kind of complacent.

What in all of that tallies with yr assertion that this was a 'good movie'

in the sense that SV is a good director, and seems to be good with actors, with genre, just not sure what he wants to say, if anything. probably nothing really - perhaps hes just better suited to directing than wanting to impart anything of his own ideas, which might make this from upthread -"He may also be a genuine, mercenary sell-out before his time" sort of redundant. maybe hes just another young modern director whose quest is simply to build a body of work without caring what that body really says/represents etc.

actually, okay, while i admire the film for being a decent enough 'woe is a fbi/police agent's life' thriller, i actually really fucking hate everything else about it.

I don't share yr understanding of what a good director is. It seems to describe a person employed in making bad, bad movies.

this was a good movie

this thing is entertaining and even thrilling moment to moment, but man is it loaded with implausibilities.

I mean the whole movie is this "serious," "gritty" know-something-ish thriller with political overtones, then in the final 20 minutes del Toro goes to Mexico and it becomes a james bond film.

also the "cut to mexican cop's morning routine and interactions with his son" thing is so half-assed. We get it, Villeneuve, you're trying to make clear the human lives caught in the crossfire, but you obviously don't give a shit about this guy at all, and it totally undercuts any point you were trying to make.

i mean, at least put something compelling in those sequences, or even some element of mystery. It's clear from the first scene that this guy is going to be killed, but man his scenes are so indifferently written and directed.

also, this is funny: https://twitter.com/davechensky/status/646701193268297728

so it's a bit of cake having and eating too when films portray such organizations as shady but nearly omnipotent. feels more like a covert worship of power than a critique of it. just a vibe I get.

― ryan, Friday, October 2, 2015 11:09 AM (4 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is otm, ultimately the federal forces in this movie are basically 80s action movie heroes.

"also the "cut to mexican cop's morning routine and interactions with his son" thing is so half-assed. We get it, Villeneuve, you're trying to make clear the human lives caught in the crossfire, but you obviously don't give a shit about this guy at all, and it totally undercuts any point you were trying to make.

i thought that was more to show that in mexico, everyone is involved with drugs, even the cops! its just a lawless land, etc etc. the film just wants you to do a big shrug basically, even as it adopts the Gritty tone of Telling it Like It is.

I saw Ramin Bahrani's 99 Homes today, and it's obviously on a different topic, but it's just everything Sicario should be. Exiting thriller tropes to tell important political story, but with everything always being clear, and always keeping sight of the human stories. It's implausible, sure, but clearly so.

Sicario is just stupid. What on earth does the ending even mean? So the columbians are willing to take over distribution, sure, I get that, but able? That is just dumb. And the police are running around saying how important it is to fuck things up for the cartels, but nobody ever mentions that they could just, y'know, legalize it. Basically everyone in the film is a moron, which is ok, but then the film also is straining to be 'important' without the slightest of ideas to back it up.

nobody ever mentions that they could just, y'know, legalize it

i mean, no one in this movie suggests legalization bc little to no people in that type of law enforcement believe in it publicly. perhaps for some that's only because holding such a position in public is political suicide in the U.S., but whatever the reason, that is not a thing that's on the table. of all the things that are inarguably and arguably implausible about sicario, its lack of a public policy debate about the pros and cons of legalization is not one of them.

The actual worst part of this movie is it's blind subscription to the "Torture: It ALWAYS works" theory of law enforcement.

x-post: I do realize that, but the film fucks up the plausibility anyhow... And this is not about realism, this is about the argument of the film being stupid, and ways that would make it less stupid. If not a law-member, then perhaps giving the word to someone other than the police at some point. As it is, the film follows narrow-minded people running around in circles and doing stupid violent shit, but I still get the feeling that it's meant to be 'important' somehow.

Like, it seems to me the point of the film is 'you can't imagine what we have to do to solve this problem!' and my reaction is 'um, actually I kinda can...' So, y'know, it's a failure of subject matter, probably.

lol

Give me the tools and I'll Danish the job

He. Drugs are illegal in Denmark as well, though.

I stand by the pun

I'm trying to work the Veep croissant gif in here somehow, but I'm not sure if it works.

The actual worst part of this movie is it's blind subscription to the "Torture: It ALWAYS works" theory of law enforcement.

Torture is used as a deus ex machina by lazy scriptwriters, because it is hard to think of a realistic way to effect the timely acquisition of secret information. It doesn't matter that torture doesn't work very well in real life so long as the plot moves briskly and audiences are carried along.

this is otm, ultimately the federal forces in this movie are basically 80s action movie heroes.

you saw a very different movie than i did. overall it was not very good, but the way the actors arced their performances from "roguish loose cannon" to "creepy, amoral murderer" is really going to stick with me. think of the Delta platoon leader saying rapey shit to one of the protagonists ("just lie back and let it happen" ... not the first time he's said that). or think of how differently the border crossing ambush goes if this is actually an 80s action movie. i thought this movie was super disturbing.

I think, tbf, you were actually watching a different movie

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

in retrospect so much of my enjoyment of the first movie was the cinematography/musical score gelling during the long overhead shots and underlit action scenes. accepting the entire "emily blunt's character is really there to be their foot in the door" non-twist as the key point of the plot, she's injected into the world of the central body of the film and expelled at the end like an audience member, perfect stand-in

the best part of sicario 2 was the trailer tbh

like c'mon when benicio does that ridiculous move where he's shooting the handgun really fast, that's the shot

yeah, the technical side of these movies is really impressive, i just wish it wasn't in the service of jerking off over the spectacle of hard-bitten men making 'difficult' decisions about murdering people in desperately awful situations

I do get the impression that the core audience isn't people who look at brolin & co. and think "these are the bad guys, too" which is bad

the "he's protecting the kid" narrative device in the second was lazy but adding "also he knows sign language because his murdered child was deaf" was perhaps a bridge too far and I may have stifled an "ahhh, c'mon" during my viewing

in a world... where grizzled men fire adavanced weapons with unheard of speed and accuracy in the pursuit of a hobby... GUN RANGE coming next fall

that was a movie with mark wahlberg iirc

i do get the impression that the core audience isn't people who look at brolin & co. and think "these are the bad guys, too" which is bad

otm - in a way i kinda appreciate that the sequel doesn't make as much of an effort to dress up its core interest in super-cool tactical manshooting in social-commentary drag tho, it's just these two horrible fucks from the first movie doing horrible shit unemcumbered by the presence of emily blunt going 'oooo shit maybe i should do something about this ahh fuck it i'll go along with it just once more'

i have to say, the kid put in a really good performance in the sequel, i liked her a lot

should probably begrudgingly rewatch the sequel when it's on a free streaming platform

looking at the credits, only now remembering that catherine keener was in this. one of the larger issues w/the sequel might have been casting good actors in the government oversight subplot and then giving that part of the script nothing but boilerplate material

bg, i must inform you that the actress that played the kid will be taking on the lead role... in a dora the explorer movie

obvious next step after a sicario film imo

and apparently omar made the same point re: keener/modine on another movies thread!

DORA THE EXPLORER by denis villeneuve, starring isabela moner, benicio del toro and josh brolin

an idealistic seven-year-old latina girl is enlisted by a a talking purple backpack and a red-booted monkey to aid in a whimsical war against drugs at the border area between the u.s. and mexico

I liked how they set up the kid as a fighter and bully, making her more complicated than just an heiress. I'd put these two closer to the Greengrass Bourne movies than boilerplate, but this is a genre where great actors and quality camerawork, editing, sound make me forgive a lot.

xpost - hahaha

the character of the kid who wants to become a sicario is pretty bad. he is a little wary about getting into the gang, i *guess* decides to shoot Benicio in order to...save his own life? no, his cousin was ready to help give him a pass on that. so I guess he really wanted to prove himself? but then he bails from the gang a few minutes before they're killed by Brolin and his crew, he's free and...a year later, he's all tatted up and i guess in the gang? i'm all right with characters have weird motivations and change of heart moments, but when they're in a thinly drawn character played by an actor who's a total blank slate...idk.

can't wait for that kid to be robin to benicio's batman in sicario 3: reqiuem

Sicario 3: So You Want to Be a Sicario

how could anyone have an issue with the sequel its mighty shtuff

nb were there meant to be subtitles we didnt get the subtitles

yeah but no tho

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.

― omar little, Sunday, 2 December 2018 20:35 (five months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yes this is all otm its good

i dislike when ppl watch a movie and when characters in it do things and we arent told dont do these things the assumption is we are being told to do these things ofc the ppl who do this always make clear they understand themselves not to do these things this is a bad way to watch and think about a movie as murky and goodlooking and confusing and stylish as this, which could not much more obviously be an exercise in execution and look

it’s like rambo iii, but bad