Soldado

This is one of those action movies that it only job is to give you as real as possible experience with its beautiful cinematography. It doesn't feel as real as ''Children of Men'' and it probably won't get a Oscar but it serves its job. The movie may not be as masterful as Villeneuve's original, but it achieves to keep you on the screen. There are really good heart-pumping scenes that beautifully blended with the score in its convoluted plot. Just like in the first movie, the story gets darker and darker. It reflects real-life situations, that's why it's so dreary and compelling. All the events is a buildup to our main story. It all ties together perfectly in the end. And even though key cast member Emily Blunt no longer here, the movie stands alone as a powerful modern-day Western, thanks to the Josh Brolin, Benicio del Toro, and Taylor Sheridan who also penned the screenplay of the first movie.

I'll definitely watch this again.

Not as good the the first one but held my attention throughout. If you can bear the plot holes and just go with it then definitely worth a watch. Benicio as always is great to watch and most of the cast do a great job. I'd recommend it if you enjoyed the first one.

Sequels typically strive to go bigger and badder than the original. This sequel is no exception. This issue with attempting to up the ante is that it often causes sequels to lose sight of what made the original special. Again, this sequel is no exception.

For some reason that I still don't understand, 'Sicario: Day of the Soldado' opens with coverage of Somali pirates, Mexican-United States border crossings, and graphic scenes of ISIS suicide bombers that will leave you unsettled for an uncomfortably long time. Government agents presume that all these terrorist efforts are connected. They're not.

The film's inclusion of these scenes doesn't add layers to the complexity of anti-terrorist or anti-drug efforts (it's unclear if that was ever the intention). Instead, the scenes only serve to offer some of the BANG BANG moments that sequels seem to require.

There's an emptiness, a pointlessness to the violence-that should be the point of the film. "The war on drugs" is a war without an opponent, and the U.S. is fighting an unwinnable fight. The violence only begets greater violence, one immoral acts leads to dozens more like it, and everyone becomes dirty in the end. This film has no heroes.

I wish that's what this movie was about, but it misses the point. It lacks the perspective and awareness of the first 'Sicario' film. The action in this film is well shot and exciting, same as the first film, but all subtle yet crucial details that made the first film excellent are wrong in this one.

The acting saves the movie from failure. Josh Brolin is excellent once again as the smirking tough guy government agent, and Benicio Del Toro is award-worthy as Alejandro, the sicario. Though he has taken frustrating character development leaps since the first film, Del Toro is nonetheless commanding, angry and tactful. Mercifully, he also provides a few drops of humanity into a movie in desperate need of some. Most actors lack the versatility to successfully transition between all these emotions. But this is Benicio Del Toro.

If you're a huge fan of Del Toro, Brolin or this genre of film, consider seeing it in the theater. Otherwise, wait until you can watch it at home.

Once you get over a bit of a slow start, the film proves to be entertaining and engrossing, and it draws attention to the inner, sometimes dirty, machinations of government and the jurisdictional "system". The acting is also pretty much all-around top-notch.

The only thing that I found as a slight negative, is that it really doesn't have any kind of re-watchabilty factor. Once you've seen and enjoyed it, as much as one can enjoy a film of this nature, I don't find that there is any allure to ever watch it again.

The first Sicario film was a surprise to me, and I enjoyed it for its slick thrills but also its darkness and twists and turns; like many I looked forward to the sequel - or rather, the next film, since this isn't really a sequel so much as a film with the same characters. The film places the characters into an unofficial war with the cartels where US forces try to engineer wars between the cartels to make them weaken and distract each other. This action is started due to terrorists being brought into the US as part of human smuggling run by the cartels - which gives the film an opening few minutes that matches the first film for impact.

From this very topical and heated place, the film actually plays out a fairly pedestrian plot that gets progressively smaller after a certain point. It delivers quite a few solid and slick sequences along the way, and mostly the impact of these carries the film. It isn't as good as it appears though, and the plotting doesn't really build - and it is disrupted by some very lazy writing where convenience keeps things going, no matter how unlikely it is. Such things do hurt the film, and took me out of the immersion I felt in the first film; in particular the ending I thought was pretty weak as a conclusion to this film, albeit opening it for the third film that we all knew was in the works before this one was even released.

The cast add to the sense of quality, and the performances are suitably tough and committed. The production standards are high, and it is easy to see the money and effort up there. It is just a shame that at its core, the writing is not as tough and engaging as everything else would have you believe. Still a solidly tense affair that is too slick to not be worth a look, but not as good as it seems.