‘Sicario’: The Perfect Movie For A Land Of Wolves (And This Is A Land Of Wolves Now)

A near-perfect-storm of talent was needed to bring Sicario—2015’s nihilistic treatise on the difficulty of waging the drug war against savage gangs with no respect for humanity or the law—to life.

Director Denis Villeneuve’s expert eye and commitment to realism melded perfectly with cinematographer Roger Deakins’s mastery over shadow and light, while the Oscar-caliber cast (Benicio Del Toro, Josh Brolin, and Daniel Kaluuya have all been nominated, at least; let’s not forget the perennially underrated Emily Blunt) combined with Johan Johansson’s sinister, pulsing score to give the proceedings a sense of horrifying gravitas.

But none of that would have mattered if not for Taylor Sheridan’s script. Sicario was Sheridan’s first produced screenplay, and its success kicked off a rather impressive run. He followed up Sicario with Hell or High Water, about a pair of brothers who rip off banks in Texas to keep their ancestral home from being foreclosed on. (Sheridan earned an Oscar nod for that screenplay.) Last year, he wrote and directed Wind River, a murder-mystery set on an Indian reservation. Sheridan is an oddity and an inspiration; simply put, this sort of career isn’t supposed to exist anymore. He’s making mid-budget, R-rated, spandex-free movies aimed at adults that aren’t raunch-coms.

Taylor Sheridan is a unicorn, one who defecates gloriously masculine zen koans rather than rainbows.

You’re always going to lose something in the translation from big screen to small screen. It’s hard to overstate the impressiveness of Deakins’s camerawork dominating your field of vision in a blacked-out movie theater, where the washed out, high-contrast desert sands wear out your eyes before the midnight-dark silhouettes of American soldiers going jefe-hunting in an under-border tunnel grant some relief. But Sheridan’s script is a constant, as good on the smallest screen as the biggest one.

Most of the best lines in Sicario are put into the mouth of Del Toro’s Alejandro, a Colombian working with the United States to help disrupt the vicious Mexican cartels making life miserable on both sides of the border. When Kate Macer (Blunt), an FBI agent added to an interagency taskforce following the discovery of dozens of bodies in a stash-house, asks him if there’s anything she needs to know about the cartels, Alejandro deflects: “You’re asking me how a watch works. For now, let’s just keep an eye on the time.” As the team mounts up to cross the border, enter Juarez, extract a high-level cartel operative, and bring him back to El Norte, Alejandro is philosophical with Kate: “Nothing will make sense to your American ears. And you will doubt everything that we do. But in the end, you will understand.”

Rather than running afoul of “show, don’t tell,” Sheridan is having Alejandro tell Kate (and, given that Kate is our stand-in on this journey into hell, the viewer) the importance of keeping her eyes open and her mouth shut. It’s good advice: the trip into and out of Juarez feels as harrowing now as it did upon release, among the tensest 15-or-so minutes in America cinema in recent years.

Kate and Alejandro are joined by CIA spook Matt Graver (Brolin), a team of U.S. Marshals, and a bevy of Delta bros all ready to rock and roll at the drop of a hat. As they blaze through the city with a Mexican escort, SUVs (and the cameras mounted on them) flying up and down over speed humps, the team takes stock of the horrors of cartel violence: mutilated bodies are strung up from overpasses; automatic weapons in the background. Villeneuve does a masterful job of ratcheting up the tension—slowing us down, speeding us up—and Johansson’s score is like something out of a horror movie, an eerie, relentless beat that rumbles right in the gut.

But the scene only really works because of the look of constant, mild nausea on Blunt’s face. Between the motion of the cars and her complete and utter inability to control the situation she has found herself in, Kate (again, like the viewer) feels sick to her stomach, stuck on a roller coaster she didn’t know she was getting on, one that has had all the safety gear stripped out and tossed aside. It’s a subtle, powerful bit of acting, one that sets the tone for much of what follows. And by the end of the film, just as Alejandro predicted, she understands.

“You should move to a small town, somewhere the rule of law still exists,” Alejandro tells Kate, still looking like she wants to vomit, near the film’s end. “You will not survive here. You are not a wolf. And this is a land of wolves now.” Sicario‘s amorality is like a blunt instrument, but a revelatory one in that it serves to remind us the world is rarely as we’d like it to be. Sometimes you make deals with people you don’t like to achieve a larger end. Sometimes you have to kill them all. As Sheridan put it in an interview for one of the Blu-ray’s special features, his film is about people dealing with the world they live in and the compromises that world forces them to make: with themselves, with each other, with their governments and their citizens.

Sonny Bunch is the executive editor of, and film critic for, the Washington Free Beacon. He’s also a cohost of The Substandard podcast and a contributor to the Washington Post.

Where to stream Sicario