Sicario 2: Soldado

As per the stu­dio bean coun­ters and self-facil­i­tat­ing aggre­ga­tion nodes who increas­ing­ly seem to have a hand in these mat­ters, the cur­rent block­buster sea­son offi­cial­ly belongs to Josh Brolin. Clear­ly the 50-year-old is enjoy­ing some­thing of a mid-career renais­sance, hav­ing starred in Avengers: Infin­i­ty War, Dead­pool 2 and now Sicario 2: Sol­da­do in rapid suc­ces­sion. Even so, ​‘the sum­mer of Josh Brolin’ feels like one of the less sig­nif­i­cant cul­tur­al nexus points in recent human his­to­ry. All things considered.

Sor­ry to pour cold water on this par­tic­u­lar PR-spun nar­ra­tive. It’s just that Brolin isn’t the only sea­soned big hit­ter on a hot streak: you may have noticed that Beni­cio Del Toro has also appeared in two record-break­ing fran­chise instal­ments of late, Infin­i­ty War and Star Wars: The Last Jedi. More to the point, he cool­ly and con­sum­mate­ly out­guns Brolin here. Which should come as lit­tle sur­prise to any­one who has fol­lowed the Puer­to Rican’s career up to this point.

Since mak­ing his break­through in Bryan Singer’s The Usu­al Sus­pects back in 1995, Del Toro has dis­played a ten­den­cy to cruise under the radar, to steal the show with­out resort­ing to showi­ness. He appears to rel­ish oper­at­ing this way, eschew­ing the bicep-curl­ing blus­ter which has become the default mode for so many lead­ing men in Hol­ly­wood in favour of a more restrained – but no less mus­cu­lar – style of performance.

The sec­ond part of a pro­posed Sicario tril­o­gy sees both Del Toro and Brolin reprise their griz­zled anti-hero roles from Denis Villeneuve’s 2015 effort, as con­flict­ed hit­man Ale­jan­dro and hard-head­ed fed­er­al fix­er Matt Graver respec­tive­ly. Each is giv­en rough­ly the same amount of screen time (although they share only a hand­ful of scenes), with the for­mer effec­tive­ly replac­ing Emi­ly Blunt’s rook­ie oper­a­tive as the film’s emo­tion­al fulcrum.

Evi­dent­ly, return­ing screen­writer Tay­lor Sheri­dan is far more inter­est­ed in devel­op­ing Alejandro’s back­sto­ry than his own scat­ter­shot car­tel saga. So while the script once again fore­grounds the hot but­ton geopo­lit­i­cal issues of bor­der con­trol, mil­i­tary inter­ven­tion and the War on Drugs, the film’s most pow­er­ful and endur­ing image is that of Ale­jan­dro using sign lan­guage to com­mu­ni­cate with a deaf per­son in the desert.

This is the only scene in the film where Sheri­dan and direc­tor Ste­fano Sol­li­ma, who knows this crime-dra­ma ter­rain well hav­ing pre­vi­ous­ly helmed the gang­land thriller Sub­ur­ra and Gomor­rah TV series, sug­gest that in order to over­come the var­i­ous bar­ri­ers to human con­nec­tion that exist in our chaot­ic mod­ern world, some­times a new dia­logue must first be estab­lished. Which is incred­i­bly frus­trat­ing. Because what this deeply cyn­i­cal film lacks more than any­thing else – espe­cial­ly at a time of strained US-Mex­i­co rela­tions – is a coher­ent, con­struc­tive message.

There is no greater sense of mean­ing or pur­pose here. Hope is not forth­com­ing; not even the com­pas­sion Ale­jan­dro shows to the daugh­ter of the noto­ri­ous mob boss who wronged him in a past life is enough to soft­en the edges of what is a grim­ly macho action movie. The con­vo­lut­ed child kid­nap­ping plot, gener­ic heli­copter shots and seat-shak­ing horn blasts that make up Hildur Guðnadóttir’s over­bear­ing score all serve to per­suade us that this is a Seri­ous Film about Real Issues. If any­thing, Sicario 2: Sol­da­do will only fuel the tox­ic dis­course around the per­ceived crises of immi­gra­tion, ter­ror­ism and organ­ised crime. Del Toro is top-draw­er though.