Review - Sicario 2: Soldado

Sicario 2: Soldado (or Sicario 2 or Day of the Soldado or just Soldado or whatever it is in your region) is the sequel to the wonderfully tense Sicario, a film about the Mexican drug cartels and how the US Government tried to control them. It was great, a proper miserable time at the cinema and another film that proved how incredible Denis Villeneuve is. However, with the sequel, he, star Emily Blunt, cinematographer Robert Deakins and composer Johan Johannsen are gone, leaving behind Josh Brolin and Benecio del Toro to make up for their absences. Before getting too into that though, the plot follows our two heroes (if you can call them that) as they... Okay, so I saw this film three days ago (as of when I'm writing this) and I don't entirely remember the plot. There were conspiracy thriller beats, the kidnapping of an important mans daughter and one plot twist that I remember predicting in the first five minutes. All in all, it was perfectly functional but considering I remember more about the original film when I haven't seen that in three years, it really should have managed better.

Performance wise, Soldado again misses out with the absence of Emily Blunt, giving us a raft of performances that range from solid to forgettable. As far as the solid ones go, that falls to Del Toro and Brolin, as should really be expected. They were great in the first film but seemingly, that was because they had Blunt to work off, ironically rounding out their characters more. Here, they both play characters whose motives you will occasionally question but will never truly believe are actually the good guys and that makes them feel pretty one sided. There's honestly not many other performances worth talking about here as they're just kind of forgettable. Isabela Moner plays a kidnapped child and she's fine. Jeffrey Donovan who I love from Fargo is here and also pretty forgettable. Catherine Keener seems to have got lost between sets or something and starved as she wanders onto a couple of scenes looking uncomfortably skinny. That's about all I have to say on that and more than I want to say.

So if we're discussing a sequel to Sicario, one of the things that has to be discussed is the tension and how the film deals with uncomfortable and incredibly brutal scenes to which it's a kind of shoulder shrug situation. I'll start with the good stuff because there are some really brilliantly done moments in Soldado and they deserve commending first of all. Plenty of the earlier scenes that show some of the more visceral events genuinely shocked me and one scene in a supermarket was more upsetting than many other moments I've seen in the cinema this year. With that praised, if you remember the original Sicario, there's a moment on a border crossing which is a legitimate masterpiece of tension and Soldado never came close to that level of tension. Hell, there was no moment here that was as tense as the average level of tension in Sicario. In what either damns the film more or praises TV, either side of Soldado I watched two episodes of two separate TV comedies that had better moments of tension than anything I saw in Soldado (for reference, the season finale of Barry and the Teddy Perkins episode of Atlanta). If a theatrically released film can't reach the heights of two half hour episodes of TV I watched in broad daylight, something somewhere has gone wrong.

I realise I've made Soldado sound like it's absolute rubbish but genuinely, it's an okay film. The problems are that there's no place for mediocrity in today's entertainment climate where I could watch a million other good to brilliant things instead of one okay thing. I don't know if I'd say to go out and watch it, even if you're a fan of the original, but if you end up watching it, it's completely solid. That's why I give Sicario 2: Soldado a