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DVD Review by Diane McCurdy - Sicario: The Day of the Soldado

Don’t go see

The narrative is told mostly through the eyes of agent Blunt. (I missed her presence in the sequel.) Having lost two of her entourage at a drug house where rotting corpses were secreted behind newly erected dry wall, she seeks a payback but she is never given complete information regarding the recently formed operation. She is presented, in fact, with conflicting data even though all plot threads lead back to a drug kingpin. The mission is to track him down and eliminate him. The methodology employed to do that is not only outside of the law, it is outside of any moral decency. Del Toro is a shadowy figure in a white suit. His role is hinted at but Emily does not find out what it is nor does she find out exactly what her role is until the final twist. Josh Brolin is the CIA agent in charge. He is inappropriately cavalier while treating the unholy madness as mere business as usual. The score, the stark cinematography underscore the theme of menace. Brolin and Del Toro reprise their roles in the sequel. The first film was directed by a French Canadian, the second by an Italian. They both have a foreign feel. Both films are brilliant and unsettling and they resonate. It is just too easy to speculate that our government does indulge in the kinds of heinous subterfuge that they describe. Does the end justify the means? Is there no intrinsic good and evil in the world but just gray areas that undulate and change? The original film as well as the sequel portray a war zone that will have no victors and one in which more than 120,000 people have already lost their lives.

TRAILER 3: Sicario: The Day of the Soldado

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