Above:
Emily Blunt stars in the latest movie from Denis Villeneuve. Photo ©Lionsgate, Black Label Media, and
Thunder Road Pictures
At the suburban mall theater
where I saw “Sicario,” a joyless new thriller directed by Denis Villeneuve, I
spotted a sign: a notice that bags would be checked. It was a reminder of the mass murders in
Aurora and, most recently, Lafayette.
For most of us, that violence is wish-you-could-forget-it horror. But for Mr. Villeneuve, killing is a
phenomenon to be dissected, probed, and scrutinized—via the lens of tastefully
bleak cinematography.
I’m not going to shout out a lecture on cinematic ethics
(not in this review, at least). But I do
think that Mr. Villeneuve should loosen his macabre shroud. Two years ago, he directed the kidnapping
mystery “Prisoners,” in which Hugh Jackman flayed a teenage boy’s skin until it
gleamed like a maraschino cherry. Now,
in “Sicario,” Mr. Villeneuve has outdone himself by multiplying that boy into a
house full of dead and brutalized bodies, sandwiched into the walls of an
Arizona townhouse invaded by FBI agents.
Leading the charge is Kate Macer (Emily Blunt). At first sight, she looks combat ready, an
action figure sealed in a black helmet and bodysuit. Yet the moment that Kate sees those sadly grotesque
bodies, she is reduced to a fountain of vomit with only one thought—to find the
cartel-running criminals responsible for the savagery she’s uncovered. A shady FBI “advisor” named Matt Garvan (Josh
Brolin) offers her a chance, though Kate isn’t sure if she should trust him.
Who would trust him?
Mr. Brolin, easing into a sleazily contented smile, is seamlessly cast
as a man who greets human depravity with nasty amusement. Yet “Sicario” doesn’t toss him any munch-worthy
dramatic meat, and Ms. Blunt fares no better.
Kate may be the focal point of “Sicario,” but she is often relegated to
the crosshairs rather than the frontlines.
At one point, a man tells her, “You look like a little girl when you’re
scared”—a line that creepily hints at Mr. Villeneuve’s lack of interest in
dreaming up a fearsome heroine and his passionate interest in projecting some sickeningly
masochistic imaginings onto Ms. Blunt’s body (as a matter of course, the film includes
an attempted rape).
Fantasy is central to Mr. Villeneuve’s work, especially his
Jake Gyllenhaal döppelganger freak-out movie “Enemy,” which trafficked in distorted
dreams and tricked-out sexual fantasies (the most unsettling of which starred an
overlarge, very fuzzy spider). Ostensibly,
“Prisoners” and “Sicario” are more realistic, but there’s a superfluous nature
to Mr. Villeneuve’s visions of crime.
Lest you forget, one scene in “Prisoners” commenced with a door-breaking
arrest and climaxed with an image both ludicrous and terrifying—the unlocking
of a plastic case filled with snakes.
Mr. Villeneuve’s knack for unfurling such horrors makes
his movies scarily entrancing (if the film career doesn’t pan out, you can
expect Denis Villeneuve’s House of Creepy Crawlies to open at a park near you). Yet his lust for horror and gore drowns any
hope of his movies flourishing with genuine meaning or emotion. I’ll admit that in “Sicario,” he does turn
his gaze toward the human toll of the drug war, most poignantly during a
vignette about the mother and the son of a corrupt, hapless cop named Silvio
(Maximiliano Hernández). But the hard
truth is that Mr. Villeneuve doesn’t care about Silvio or his family.
If
they didn’t suffer, he’d be out of a job.
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