Critics should review the movie, not the audience.
But it was impossible not to notice that a woman sitting next to me at the Toronto International Film Festival flinched repeatedly during “Sicario.” The scope, speed and intensity of the violence may take your breath away; at one point I didn’t even have time to complete my gasp when three rapid shots found their deadly marks late in the game of this action thriller.
“Sicario,” which means “hitman,” opens in Chandler, Ariz., with a massive, macabre discovery. On the hunt for hostages, FBI agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) and her kidnap-response team instead discover a grisly graveyard hidden behind the walls of a house owned by a drug kingpin. Corpses, their heads wrapped in plastic, stand like silent, shocking sentries once the walls are peeled away.
That mission leads to Kate being recruited to be part of a mysterious government task force determined to smoke out or smoke a Mexican drug lord. She finds herself working with team leader Matt Graver (Josh Brolin), who appears charming and easygoing, and a taciturn operative, Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro), sent from Cartagena, Colombia.
As Alejandro says to Kate when they land in Mexico, rather than the El Paso she believed was their destination: “Nothing will make sense to your American ears, and you will doubt everything we do but in the end, you will understand.”
Understand, yes. Agree? Not necessarily.
Starring: Emily Blunt, Benicio Del Toro, Josh Brolin.
Rating: R for strong violence, grisly images, and language.
The audience is, like the idealistic, rules-abiding Kate, baffled by the plunge into darkness and brutality and lawlessness that some suggest are the only potent weapons in the war on drugs.
“Sicario,” from director Denis Villeneuve (“Prisoners,” “Incendies”) and writer Taylor Sheridan, dramatizes the seeming impossibility of taming the drug trade, the innocents living in Mexico or fleeing the corruption, cartels and collateral damage there, and the American war waged in the shadows. There’s a reason they call them Black Ops.
Ms. Blunt makes Kate a fierce warrior, an outsider who is often the only woman in the room. She’s an agent who can be fearless and allow her FBI instincts to take over when under fire and yet, at times, be barely able to tame the anxiety almost seeping from her pores.
In addition to the enigmatic Del Toro and engaging Brolin (he’s having a fabulous fall with this and “Everest”), excellent support comes from British actor Daniel Kaluuya as Reggie, Kate’s FBI partner who can coax a smile from her or provide another bid for integrity.
“Sicario” is hard to believe at times, as when a border backup turns into a Wild West shootout, and also intense, tense, violent, provocative and deserving of a recoil or flinch as questions about boundaries both literal and figurative take direct aim at the audience.
Movie editor Barbara Vancheri: bvancheri@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1632. Read her blog: www.post-gazette.com/madaboutmovies.
First Published: October 2, 2015, 4:00 a.m.