Movie Review: "Sicario: Day of the Soldado" Is More Blunt, Has Less Emily

Removing Emily Blunt has never helped any cinematic equation, but Sicario sequel Day of the Soldado somehow survives, and almost thrives. Almost.

Day of the Soldado, the unexpected sequel to 2015’s Sicario, is a bummer, and that’s even compared to its predecessor, which was hardly a quinceañera.

I mean that in a good way. Bumming viewers out is kind-of this series’ thing.

The original’s director, Denis Villeneuve, has subbed in Stefano Sollima for this second go-round, and if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Villeneuve should be flattered as f***. This bisection of the America-Mexico drug war is just as violent, comes with a droning score by Hildur Guðnadóttir that pays homage to the previous and now departed composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, and spends hours sowing seeds of dread in the pit of your stomach.

Some things are different. For instance, Soldado’s ending is much darker, remarkably. And 'people' have replaced 'drugs' as the cartels’ preferred stock in trade, giving the film some additional gravitas during this current political moment. (Perhaps it’s not the compassionate reflection on the lost souls caught between smugglers as might have been appreciated.)

However, there’s no Villeneuve and there’s no Emily Blunt, the star of the predecessor, and there’s also no denying the original stood tall by itself, leaving Day of the Soldado to feel a little like franchise-extender. Nonetheless, though it may not entirely find a new story to tell, Soldado finds more story to tell, and it tells it well, albeit with less finesse and underlying subtext, yet with suspenseful action sequences and strong performances across the board.

For newcomers: Sicario starred Blunt as an idealistic FBI agent who travels to Mexico to bring down the cartels, believing the spin from CIA spook Matt Graver (Josh Brolin) about making real change over the border. She instead discovered, first hand, the futile violence of men, not only in the drug war, but in the workplace too. She isn’t invited back for Soldado. If you were being generous, you’d call it additional, after-credits social commentary.

On paper, Day of the Soldado deals itself a fatal blow by leaving Blunt on the bench. Brolin is here, of course, as is Benicio Del Toro, playing Alejandro, the titular ‘sicario’ (meaning ‘hitman’) on Graver’s bankroll, who, last we saw, delivered irredeemable retribution to the drug lord responsible for murdering his family. Even Jeffrey Donovan gets a second guernsey, as another American agent working for Graver’s black-ops team. Still, without Blunt as the picture’s beating heart, I figured any follow-up to Sicario would be rudderless.

And to a degree, it is. Day of the Soldado, written by returning screenwriter Taylor Sheridan, centers on Graver and Alejandro, and forces them to suddenly find a conscience (maybe) and some compassion for the teenage daughter of a kingpin they conspire to kidnap (played by Isabela Moner, who is astounding). For a while, I balked at this recalibration. Brolin is convincingly gruff and sardonic as the despicable Graver, and del Toro is scintillating as the murderous antihero. But north stars, they ain’t. And every time the movie tried to tell me they were 'the good guys'—in contrast to the American government, who dream up the kidnapping to set the cartels against one another, and the violent people smugglers in Juárez—I felt like Michael Bluth meeting Ann Veal: "Them?"

It wasn’t until the closing moments, as Guðnadóttir’s bowel-rupturing drone crescendos over cinematographer Dariusz Wolski’s final, morally complicated final shots, I realised the disturbing reality of this Blunt-less sequel. "These are the good guys," is precisely what Sollima and Sheridan want us to think, and it’s not meant to come as a comfort. Few things in this saga ever do.

3.5/5

In cinemas 26 June. Rated MA15+ for strong violence.

Photo: Roadshow