On one level, the Taylor Sheridan-written Sicario movies exist solely to answer the question, “What would it look like if Benicio del Toro was a merciless, hyper-violent, highly skilled assassin?” (The answer is: terrifying, but, if you can remind yourself that it’s just a movie, awesome.) However, one could also approach these films as a thought experiment: How could the U.S. government exploit chaos at the border for nefarious gains?
In recent years, if blog posts from inside the beltway are to be believed, there is a growing sentiment among hawkish conservatives that the way to achieve the aims of the United States is to “do Sicario.” Far be it from me to suggest that President Donald Trump is getting his ideas from crime thrillers with byzantine scripts and moody cinematography. (Is there any evidence to suggest he has the attention span to watch anything longer than an episode of The Apprentice?) But puzzling over the current administration’s weaponization of its hazily defined immigration policy—resulting in the headline-grabbing cases of Kilmar Abrego Garcia and Mahmoud Khalil—brings to mind a line from Sicario’s ruthless CIA man, Matt Graver (Josh Brolin), when he’s pressed to explain his true aims: “Shake the tree and create chaos.”
On one level, the Taylor Sheridan-written Sicario movies exist solely to answer the question, “What would it look like if Benicio del Toro was a merciless, hyper-violent, highly skilled assassin?” (The answer is: terrifying, but, if you can remind yourself that it’s just a movie, awesome.) However, one could also approach these films as a thought experiment: How could the U.S. government exploit chaos at the border for nefarious gains?
In recent years, if blog posts from inside the beltway are to be believed, there is a growing sentiment among hawkish conservatives that the way to achieve the aims of the United States is to “do Sicario.” Far be it from me to suggest that President Donald Trump is getting his ideas from crime thrillers with byzantine scripts and moody cinematography. (Is there any evidence to suggest he has the attention span to watch anything longer than an episode of The Apprentice?) But puzzling over the current administration’s weaponization of its hazily defined immigration policy—resulting in the headline-grabbing cases of Kilmar Abrego Garcia and Mahmoud Khalil—brings to mind a line from Sicario’s ruthless CIA man, Matt Graver (Josh Brolin), when he’s pressed to explain his true aims: “Shake the tree and create chaos.”
Josh Brolin as Matt Graver suits up for chaos in Sicario.
Sicario (Spanish for “hitman”) made its debut at the esteemed Cannes Film Festival in 2015, the first of Quebecois director Denis Villeneuve’s projects to compete in the main slate. Though he had a hit two years prior with his first English-language film, the crime thriller Prisoners, the sinister Sicario was the one that launched him to elite status with cinephiles who place a premium on technical acuity and determined formalism. (This is a polite way of saying “film bros.”) The second shot in Sicario is of dust randomly whipping through a shaft of light, a recurring image that likely has symbolic meaning, but also may be there simply because it looks cool.
It was also the first screenplay written by then-45-year-old Sheridan, an actor of modest success who—with the series Yellowstone and its myriad spin-offs—has now developed into one of the biggest writer-producers in Hollywood. Sheridan is also unusual in the entertainment industry for straying from typical liberal talking points. (Behold a visit to Joe Rogan’s podcast to bemoan the death of masculinity.) While he has never voiced full-on support for Trump, he did walk back a 2017 pro-impeachment comment when speaking to press in 2022. While Commentary magazine has hailed him as an “Anti-Woke King, more nuanced critics conclude that the politics of his flagship series seem to be deliberately chaotic.
If you are getting a bit of a “male energy” vibe from all this, it may come as a surprise to learn that Sicario’s protagonist is a woman. It’s through the eyes and ears of FBI agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) that we slowly uncover the ruthless machinations of a CIA operation that appears to have approval going all the way to the top.
We meet Macer, whose focus is retrieving missing persons, while she and her team move in on a safe house in Arizona run by the Sonora Cartel. In the most eerie way possible, she discovers a collection of dead bodies vacuum-sealed inside the walls. (The place is also booby trapped for added punctuation.)
Emily Blunt as FBI agent Kate Macer enters a tunnel to Sonora, Mexico, in Sicario.
Though who, precisely, the dead people are remains a little vague, CNN headlines about a “house of horrors” are enough to trigger a tense meeting in a soundproof room with a lot of stern-looking men. In addition to Macer’s boss, who vouches for her, there’s Brolin’s Graver, a mercurial, charismatic man who obviously rarely tells the truth.
On paper, Graver is from the Department of Defense, and he wants Macer to join an interdepartmental task force that seems to answer to nobody but has a limitless budget. We will later learn that, naturally, he’s CIA, but he needs someone on the team from the FBI in order to get approval for operations on this side of the U.S.-Mexico border. This sounds like a bit of a screenwriting cheat to me, but many a movie classic is rife with them. You think the Nazis would really care about “letters of transit” signed by Charles De Gaulle to get people out of Casablanca? (Roger Ebert lovingly railed about this at length in a Casablanca commentary track years ago.)
The other key member on the team is Benecio del Toro’s tight-lipped Alejandro, who moves like a shadow and is clearly haunted by demons. (He twitches as he snoozes aboard a private jet.) What we’ll learn is that when things get too hairy even for Graver or his Delta Force guys, Alejandro steps in, either for executions or “information extractions.” (That he whistles “Hail to the Chief” before stepping into a harshly lit interrogation chamber is not the movie’s most subtle moment.) Who he is and where he comes from is one of the central mysteries of the film.
So what is this team doing? Sicario is slow to reveal its true intention, keen to stay focused on its fetishistic look at high-powered weapons and drone surveillance footage. (There are many “Earth from above” shots that revel in the Mexican landscape.) The cartel has its inside man, Manuel, somewhere in the U.S., and Macer (and we) are led to believe that by extracting Manuel’s brother Guillermo from Mexico and bringing him back to the U.S., it will smoke out his location, and this could maybe lead us to the cartel’s big boss.
Villeneuve, with cinematographer Roger Deakins, editor Joe Walker, and composer Johan Johannsson amp up the tension during step one of the operation, giving the whole sequence a “plunge into the abyss” feel. I would not be the first critic to compare the first incursion south of the border to Apocalypse Now, though instead of a river through the jungle, it’s a pocked road through urban decay, decorated with the strung-up corpses of those who dared disobey the cartel. The mayor of Ciudad Juárez, where much of the action takes place, was understandably less than pleased with the production; he called for a boycott, and considered suing for defamation.
With the brother in U.S. hands—and by deploying Alejandro’s methods—we learn about corrupt police on both sides of the border and a smuggling tunnel between Sonora and Arizona. (Tunnels like this have been found in reality, so this isn’t exclusively right-wing paranoia.) Eventually, we learn the truth about Alejandro. He was once an idealistic prosecutor in Mexico whose wife and daughter were murdered by the cartels. He has hardened his heart, and channeled his rage into become a remorseless killing machine, caring only about vengeance. And who has set him loose? Not just the CIA, but the Medellín cartel in Colombia.
Huh? Well, that’s the twist to Sicario. The U.S. figures it is better to pick off the Mexican cartels one by one, then work with a single group that can control the entire flow of narcotics. Maybe the Colombians are offering a better percentage of the deal; that aspect is left to the imagination. Kate Macer, representing the audience, is left to shake her head but ultimately shrug it off, as if to say, it’s a dirty business, but maybe it’s for the best?
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An explosion sends smoke over a line of cars on a city street. - An explosion from a scene in Sicario: Day of the Soldado.
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A man with a gun patrols with a weapon drawn at the back of a car on a dirt road. - Del Toro on border patrol in Sicario: Day of the Soldado.
How this enterprise is progressing isn’t really revealed in Sicario: Day of the Soldado, the 2018 sequel. Comparing the first and second films on a cinematic level is interesting. The first movie is much more cerebral, the second is absolutely action-packed—and gory and gross. Sheridan once again wrote it, but Villeneuve stepped out as director, replaced by Stefano Sollima, best known for the Italian mafia series Gomorrah. (Villeneuve moved on to direct Arrival, Blade Runner 2049, and the Dune films.) Though it had a slightly larger budget, Day of the Soldado doesn’t look anywhere near as good as the original, so maybe the film bros have a point about Villeneuve and cinematographer Deakins (also absent) having a kind of magic touch.
Emily Blunt’s Kate Macer also didn’t return for the sequel. While there is a replacement female character—Catherine Keener as Graver’s boss at the CIA—she does not come equipped with a moral compass (however dormant) like Macer had.
Day of the Soldado’s instigating event is even more of a Fox News talking point than corpses in walls: The flow of migrants over the border is used as cover for fundamentalist Muslims who want to blow up American supermarkets.
As such, the president (never seen, though Matthew Modine appears as an astringent secretary of defense) declares that cartels have been added to the list of terrorist organizations, something the Trump administration did in January.
While the cartels are shown profiting off the flow of migrants in Day of the Soldado, it remains vague just how connected they truly are to the Islamic State-like groups depicted in the prologue.
Though it didn’t seem as if there were many in the first movie, Graver assures Alejandro that there are “no rules this time.” Destabilizing individual cartels one by one is taking too long. Graver and Alejandro’s objective is to start a major civil war throughout Mexico, and they plan to do it through a series of false flag operations.
They begin by kidnapping the daughter of a cartel head, bringing her to the United States, then having U.S. police “rescue her.” One problem: Try outsmarting a teenager! She figures out the ruse just as moles in the Mexican police force turn on our CIA operatives, leading to the first of many bloody shoot-em-ups. There are more twists and turns, leading to a pretty juicy lead-in for a third Sicario movie that is allegedly happening, though there have been delays.
The first Sicario was not a runaway box office smash, but it did very well with critics—achieving a 92% on Rotten Tomatoes (a deeply flawed but still useful metric). Most reviews recognized it as a cut above the usual FBI drama, and there were three Academy Award nominations, though not for its writing, directing, or performances. (They were for cinematography, sound editing, and original score.) The more rough and rowdy sequel was reviewed a little more harshly, with some critics suggesting the series had gone from bleak to outwardly xenophobic. (Even the typically conservative New York Post called it “nasty.”)
Macer looking for trouble and finding it in Sicario.
What does any of this have to do with the Trump administration? The president has been labeling those who cross the Mexican border violent criminals since he announced his candidacy at Trump Tower in 2015, about a month after Sicario’s Cannes debut. Rewatching the movies now, I found myself thinking about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident wrongly deported as part of Trump’s promise to get “tough” on the border; a promise that, from my perspective, appears to care little about taking extreme, even illegal action, so long as that action sends a message. “Shake the tree and create chaos.”
Labelling the cartels as terrorists, as is done in Day of the Soldado, reminded me a bit of the official excuse for yanking Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil and whisking him to an ICE detention center in Louisiana. To me, it feels like the government is relying on technicalities to make some bold moves, bringing us one step closer to the world depicted in these movies. While Khalil was indeed a leader of campus protests that were undoubtedly critical of U.S. policy (a protected First Amendment activity that a Green Card holder like him is allowed to undertake), the White House initially suggested that that either he or his organization distributed Hamas propaganda during one of the direct actions, figuring they could nail him on this because Hamas is listed as a terrorist organization. The specific charges have deviated, however, as the case has lingered.
What I find most interesting about the Sicario films is how they differentiate from the paranoid thrillers of 50 years ago like The Parallax View or Three Days of the Condor. Whereas those movies were warnings about the spread of U.S. imperialism, the tone in Sicario is a bit “harsh, but necessary,” and downright, “This is a little bit badass, isn’t it?” in Day of the Soldado. It’s an undeniable vibe shift and has me worried about the trilogy’s potential finale.
