Rating: 15
Directed by: Stefano Sollima
Starring: Benicio Del Toro, Josh Brolin, Isabela Moner
Sicario 2: Soldado opens with a suicide bombing.
The camera glides across the front of a Kansas City store, following a group of anonymous men who walk inside, assume positions and detonate.
The camera doesn’t move, unflinching in the horror. And you know you are back in the nihilistic world that was established in the first.
In Sicario, you followed Emily Blunt’s FBI agent into the murky world of the war on drugs. It left you as bewildered as her when she experienced the tactics employed by Josh Brolin’s mysterious spook, Matt Graver and his hitman contact Alejandro (Del Toro).
If that was the audience experiencing a taste of the battlefield, Soldado - which means ‘soldier’ in Spanish - throws the audience into the trenches.
When the US Government realises it is the Mexican cartels who are enabling terrorists to slip through the border and attack, they give Graver free reign to do what is necessary to stop them.
Graver opts to create a war and let Alejandro off the leash.
Their plan is to kidnap a drug lord’s ‘princess’, his daughter Isabel (Moner) and play off the gangs against one another.
It keeps the slow burn of the first film, all fantastic landscapes and military portent. But when the action escalates, it spikes into moments of extreme - and unnervingly realistic - violence.
All this is scored by Hildur Gudnadottir, who has picked up the essence of the late Johann Johannson’s superlative work on the first.
Most of it takes place in the world of the border, with migrants now a more profitable commodity than drugs.
But instead of driving home a message about the timely setting, it becomes a dusty hellscape for writer Taylor Sheridan’s modern western to unfold in.
There is palpable tension when the action moves into Mexico, demonstrated no better than in a central convoy sequence which sees their group blinded by dust.
But dust isn’t the only thing blinding them.
As the action unfolds, it attempts to shatter the mindsets of Alejandro, who has spent years on a vengeful crusade against the cartels, and Graver, who executes his missions with little connection to the human consequences.
Both actors do an admirable job of creating cracks in their hypermasculine characters.
The chisel which helps is Isabela Moner’s kidnapped teen, who holds her own against the two veteran hard men.
For Brolin in particular, Soldado represents another role in a blockbuster summer which has already seen him be both a cyborg and an alien tyrant.
Fittingly, this might be his most human performance, taking Graver on a path back to his own conscience.
Just as the first film tracked a secondary story of a police officer who had been coerced by the cartel, this one follows a teen with dual-nationality who is brought into the cartel’s world via his older cousin.
And just like the first, the paths of this boy and the two leads are set to collide.
The finale might be too neat for some, in a world which is dedicated to showing how messy these secret battles can be.
But Soldado has done a darkly decent job continuing the legacy of the first while developing into a different, more agile beast.
4/5
