Review: Sicario: Day Of The Soldado

Image courtesy of Columbia Pictures.

On the one hand, it's great to see Benicio Del Toro and Josh Brolin get their own franchise - if that's how"Sicario" and its sequel, "Day of the Soldado," could be classified. On the other, this second film about government agents using any means necessary to battle Mexican cartels doesn't say or show us anything that its predecessor, which was directed by Denis Villeneuve, didn't do significantly better.

So, what we have here is a well-enough made, occasionally intense, often brutal and somewhat repetitive sequel. Yes, it's a, well, I'm not sure that delight is the word, but you catch my drift, to watch Del Toro and Brolin track down villainous characters running drugs and trafficking people on the border and bring them to justice. But the film's thoughts on the matter of border security are clumsy, to say the least.

The film opens with the type of sequence that could kick off a Donald Trump campaign video. A group of Islamic terrorists seemingly sneak across the border and detonate some bombs in a Kansas City grocery store - because, you know, that sort of thing just happens all the time. Or, at least, that's what we've been sold by those who want to close off our borders.

Next, we see Brolin torture a Somali man familiar with the terrorists by making him watch on a computer screen as the U.S. military bombs his home, killing his family members. And the manner in which the scene is filmed makes you question whether you're supposed to be unsettled by the barbarism of the whole scenario or cheering Brolin on. Later in the film, the picture takes on a "Zero Dark Thirty" theme of whether all of our government's pursuits - and the bloodying of its hands in the process - has been worth it, but unlike Kathryn Bigelow's film, this one is pursuing such themes in the name of exploitation, rather than serious discourse.

This sequel's plot is centered around the kidnapping of a cartel leader's daughter (Isabela Moner) by the U.S. government for the purpose of setting off a war between the cartels. Brolin takes his direction from a Secretary of Defense (Matthew Modine) and lackey (Catherine Keener) so sinister that they could probably get hired by the Trump administration.

Meanwhile, there's another plot thread regarding a Mexican American teenager (Elijah Rodriguez) living in Texas who assists the cartels with smuggling people across the border. His story only exists to provide two crucial plot twists, one in which he runs across Del Toro's character during a border crossing and another in which he is paid a visit at the film's end. In between, there's a lot of violence - people are shot in the face, carloads full of men are gunned down, a grenade is thrown into a passing car - and so on.

Villeneuve's "Sicario" was a tense crime drama that also followed a group of agents battling the brutal Mexican cartels. That film was also violent, and Del Toro and Brolin's characters were, in that previous entry, morally compromised. But it also had Emily Blunt's character to provide some sort of moral compass and it was, frankly, just a more accomplished picture. "Day of the Soldado" isn't bad. It's engrossing enough and features some good performances - Del Toro especially. But it feels like it's cashing in on an idea that was already better executed the first time around. In other words, it's your typical sequel.