Sicario : La Guerre des cartels

Film starts really well. Gritty, violent, miltaristic. Relevant and exciting. Cool photography and sound. Interesting plot line. Seems like a solid follow-up to the excellent original. Helicopters, machine guns, explosions, mercenaries and black ops. But about halfway through it comes to a screeching halt that it never recovers from, even as there are some scenes that give you hope that the pace will resume.

But the film commits itself to going with a train of events that are not engaging or exciting. It never follows up with what could have been supremely interesting, the cartel war that the planned and executed event was supposed to trigger. Instead it undoes itself with the embarassingly obvious attempt to set that stage for another sequel. We get a lot of wasted time on the way, with story decisons that make no sense, and a convoluted and boring backward human-smuggling idea with political motivations.

The other major annoyance is the young gangster character. He does not act, at all, and his one-expression face alone is extremely unpleasant, not in a menacing way, but punchworthy. Highly ineffective and off-putting. Really bad casting.

First half was great. Second half was a joke.

Pros: The story was well told.

The characters were engaging.

Benicio Del Toro is a God.

An honest portrayal of a sad reality.

Cons: one character should have remained how he was, that would have been a fitting send off for his character. Is it better than the first Sicario? Yes. Why? No moral compass, it doesn't exist in the real world.

I thought this movie was pretty good. It's a follow-up to the absolutely terrific film Sicario but it doesn't quite stay in the same tier as the original. The acting is still just as good as the first. Brolin and del Toro are incredibly talented and the new actors/actresses like Isabela Moner did a fantastic job. I just thought some characters weren't consistent with their actions like the first one. Especially del Toro's character, it was written a bit weirdly and the ending was kind of odd compared to what I would have expected to happen given their nature in the first movie. I still recommend a watch and even a back-to-back viewing with the original but I really hope they close this series with the cliffhanger and keep it a solid one-two punch. 3.5/5 stars.

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.

Okay, so this doesn't come close to the first movie in the series. But, it comes close enough to being close that it's much more than watchable. It's actually a very good movie. If it was a standalone movie and Sicario never happened, people would more appreciative. Del Toro is his usual badass self. The cartels and U.S. law enforcement are brutal, per the usual. I recommend this to anyone who enjoys fast action.