Day of the Soldado lurches to find its heart and soul without Emily Blunt. The fish-out-of-water story tempered the grit, gore, and alienation of the original. Without seeing the story from her perspective, we’re forced to view it through two of the beloved secondary characters, who were so compelling because they were hard to read and not quite fully formed.
Isaac Butler’s analysis of the sequel puts it another way, describing the actors’ characterization in the original Sicario as being the saving grace for lopsided writing: “Blunt, Brolin, and del Toro take ciphers and turn them into full characters, and director Denis Villeneuve helps compensate for the script’s weaknesses by constantly aiming his camera at Blunt thinking and searching for answers.” Which is not to say that director Stefano Sollima had to follow with rigid adherence to the formula laid out for him by his predecessor. Far from it. Sequels are better when they try new things and don’t lean too hard on the familiar. Think Empire. Think Terminator. Think Shrek.
DotS bears some of the marks of inventiveness that the original provided. Sicario romanticized the militarization of the border, made a war film out of a the Texico border. The plot tumbled in unexpected directors, carried by its own creative momentum. We can see elements of that kinesis here too: the duplicity Matt’s team employs during Isabel. (Josh Brolin is having a good year, older brother says. Fresh off of Infinity War, Deadpool 2, but this was a safe role for him, bordering on boring.) Benicio del Toro’s execution scene is iconic, shocking, and vivid. The weaving together of the story with the young man learning to become a coyote with Isabel’s narrative arc was subtle and patient. Every scene with Benicio del Toro is electric, even the scene where Isabel and Alejandro stumble upon the deaf farmer’s land transcends the usual stereotypes.
That said, Taylor Sheridan built a lot of good will from his last two films to do some new, experimental things, say things that were controversial or took us out of our comfort zones, and for the most part he didn’t capitalize on that good will. DotS is not quite a color-by-numbers action adventure movie (the plot is too free-wheeling for that), but lacks the same mix of high and low concept that made the first film so compelling. Possibly this is my fault and I was misled by trailers about what genre the movie is. I think after seeing it, it’s a revenge film that turns into a western about grace, but it’s billed as an action movie.
Someone wrote the scenes for the beginning with a completely different tone. Josh Brolin’s interrogation scene and the special ops in Somalia both feel like kind of a headfake in retrospect. The incongruence doesn’t throw you in the moment, because there hasn’t been enough time for the mood to set, but when you come out the other side, it’s hard to do apologetics for why those scenes were so necessary for the progression of storytelling. There are other examples of genre incongruence that are more damning, like the quick cut scene to Brolin in the centcom room and the importance placed on tracing a dirty cop, which ultimately comes to nothing. The overall feeling is that something’s been lost in the editing. The tense shootout on the dirt road feels recycled, as do the aerial shots of the convoys traversing the border. Wish they had given Isabel more to do besides get into a fight for the first ten seconds of her time on screen and then smolder at her headmaster for a bit. She wasn’t asked to do much more than scream and wriggle after her first scene, and Alejandro insists on speaking to her almost exclusively in English, even though she’s living in Mexico, except for the moment when he recovers her in the desert near the truck (which is maybe a cool thing, but the weirdness of their language relationship takes me out of it).
The way I put it to my dad when he asked a few hours later how I liked it was: for people who see a lot of movies, there is a higher barrier to clear for distinction. (There’s a similarly high bar for moviegoers who only show up to two or three films a year and are maybe looking outside their genre comfort zone, which is why I think there are such strong reactions to super hero movies both good and bad when they aspire to be more than a regular action film.) But when it comes down to it, if you go to a friend’s house and they’ve got the Sicario and DotS DVDs lying on the couch, I’m not going to recommend DotS to anyone unless you really, really liked the original and you don’t want to watch it again. It’s not that I don’t want it to exist. It’s that no one really needed it to exist. There’s good news ultimately for those who might be disappointed by this: there’s a better version of this movie that’s already out there and it’s the first Sicario.
Extra reading: I like the analysis of Sheridan’s writing style from Slate by Isaac Butler.
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