Sicario Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.5
Video		4.5
Audio		5.0
Extras		2.5
Overall		4.5

Sicario Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman December 30, 2015

There have been a number of really interesting offerings detailing the kind of weirdly dysfunctional “sibling” relationship between El Paso, Texas and Juarez, Mexico, two cities which butt up against each other but which have experienced radically different histories due to both various socioeconomic forces as well as what are perceived as either successes or failures of law enforcement. The vast bulk of the raging criminal activity in Juarez is due to the region’s active drug trade, and there have been both documentaries (Narco Cultura) and fictional entries (The Bridge: The Complete First Season) which have dealt with various issues arising from these (at times literally) underground activities. It’s commendable, then, that Sicario manages to revisit both this subject matter and this actual location with a fresh urgency and disturbingly visceral energy. Sicario gets its title from the Latin word Sicarius, meaning “dagger man”, which was actually used in the early Christian era to describe early Jewish zealots who undertook assassinations to attain their desired political (and/or religious) ends. (Armchair etymologists may know that the very word “assassination” has its own link to zealots, in this case Islamic followers of Hassan-i-Sabbah who were supposedly partakers of hashish, thus making them Hashishin or Hashshashin, which ultimately evolved into the modern word.) The appellation is shorthanded here to simply mean “hitman”, and while Sicario takes a fairly circuitous route to finally get to what turns out to be a central killing, there is no dearth of violent deaths on the way to that sequence. Some of the real life intrigue surrounding Juarez’s incipient drug trade has spilled into daily headlines courtesy of the saga of Joaquín Guzmán, otherwise known as “El Chapo”, and Sicario perhaps trades on that infamy by positing a top secret drug lord hiding out in Mexico whom a coterie of various international agents want to bring to justice.

Before Sicario journeys across the southern border, it begins with a harrowing FBI SWAT takedown of a supposed hostage scene in Chandler, Arizona. Agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) is in charge of the operation, which initially seems to go according to plan, albeit with several casualties on the part of the bad guys. It’s only when another agent discovers a gruesome secret tucked away behind the walls of the house the feds have taken by storm that Kate and her cohorts realize they’ve stumbled onto something with a wider impact than a “mere” hostage crisis. When an unexpected calamity then follows, Kate is thrown for an emotional loop, as is her right hand man, Reggie Wayne (Daniel Kaluuya). When the two agents are subsequently called to some sort of high level meeting, they assume the worst, feeling that they’re going to be called on the carpet for that very calamity.

Instead, Kate finds herself in a confusing situation where she’s asked to volunteer for a mission which involves mysterious CIA agent and Department of Defense advisor Matt Graver (Josh Brolin), and his equally enigmatic partner Alejandro Gillick (Benicio del Toro). Both of these men are extremely laconic, unwilling to give up too much information about what exactly is going on, something that keeps both Kate and the audience in a state of some befuddlement throughout much of Sicario’s initial setup. The stated purpose of the team’s mission is to extradite the brother of the leader of Mexico’s biggest drug cartel, in an attempt to gain further information about where this long hidden leader is. While Kate is initially told they’re going to El Paso, they actually end up in Juarez, where a tense set piece unfolds involving scores of both American and Mexican law enforcement types. While neither Graver nor Gillick are very forthcoming, Gillick at least has the grace to tell Kate to be careful of the Mexican police, since they aren’t necessarily “good guys”, a piece of advice that comes in handy when the American team is caught in a traffic jam on the by now iconic Bridge of the Americas that spans the space between El Paso and Juarez.

It’s not fair to describe in much detail what eventually ends up happening, other than to say that the “real” reason behind the entire mission turns out to be somewhat more shaded than simply bringing a bad guy to justice. What Sicario depicts so viscerally is (as one of the supplements on this Blu-ray describes it) the “machine” of both the drug trade and the law enforcement attempts to curtail it. Sicario has a number of outstanding sequences, but it tends to tip over into needless hyperbolism at times, including at least two different moments where Kate is reduced to traditional “damsel in distress” material.

Those potential missteps aside, the film routinely delivers some gut punches as it moves to its incredibly forceful climax, when Gillick’s tortured operative finally becomes the focal character and the final denouement is offered to the audience. In fact Sicario engages in a bit of bait and switch in a way, seeming to posit the film as Kate’s story when really it’s Gillick’s tale that ends up being the through line and the element which provides most of the film’s disturbing emotional resonance.

Sicario repeatedly exploits a kind of almost existential angst as it explores the devastation left by the illicit drug industry. This devastation is probably nowhere more present than in what initially seems like odd interstitial sequences showing the kind of squalid home life of a Mexican policeman named Silvio (Maximiliano Hernández). When screenwriter Taylor Sheridan finally weaves this character into the overall arc rather late in the film, the seemingly inescapable cycle of death, despair and violence appears to be one of the few unwounded survivors to outlast any momentary maelstrom.

Sicario Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Sicario is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Lionsgate Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.40:1. Shot digitally with a variety of Arri Alexa cameras, Sicario looks exceptionally sharp and well detailed virtually all of the time, with a few minor exceptions. The dusty, kind of beige-brown ambience of the American Southwest is detailed in a gritty, lifelike manner, with elements like scrub or even dust clouds offered with no resolution problems. The film was lensed by Roger Deakins (still rather incredibly without an Academy Award despite multiple nominations), and some of the close quartered framings, especially during the tense initial operation in Juarez, offer at times alarming detail (some may not appreciate the detail in elements like corpses hanging from a freeway overpass). A few isolated scenes have been graded toward the yellow side of things (see screenshots 14 and 15), though detail is not materially affected. There are some stylistic oddities at play here, especially starting at around 50 or so minutes into the film, when suddenly a kind of "found footage" ambience shows up for a while which includes elements like closed circuit camera feeds. Later, when the team engages in their final mission, we get "night vision" perspectives that in some cases offer virtually no detail of any appreciable kind. There are nonremovable subtitles at several key junctures when various characters break into Spanish (see screenshot 2).

Sicario Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Sicario is the latest offering to sport a Dolby Atmos mix (with a Dolby TrueHD 7.1 core, the version addressed in this review). The film begins with an almost subliminal pulsing which begins taking over the lower frequencies to a degree that will probably provoke angst in many listeners. These and other techniques by composer Jóhann Jóhannsson fully utilize the surround channels while also consistently engaging the subwoofer, all of which adds up to sonic beds that often feature a kind of restive, uneasy quality, perfectly attuned to the film's emotional tenor. Set pieces like the marauding race through the crowded streets of Juarez also provide ample opportunity for things like panning effects and discrete placement of ambient environmental sounds. Dialogue is very cleanly presented and is always well prioritized. Fidelity is spot on, supporting some extremely wide dynamic range.

Sicario Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Stepping Into Darkness: The Visual Design of Sicario (1080p; 16:46) focuses on tone as much as actual cinematography.


• Blunt, Brolin and Benicio: Portraying the Characters of Sicario (1080p; 14:35) features interviews with various cast and crew members and isn't necessarily relegated to talk only about the three central characters.


• A Pulse from the Desert: The Score of Sicario (1080p; 6:19) profiles Jóhann Jóhannsson.


• Battle Zone: The Origins of Sicario (1080p; 13:45) comes replete with a warning that it contains graphic imagery, courtesy of reproductions of some gruesome crime scene photos and video.

Sicario Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Occasional silliness like Blunt's Kate answering an acolyte who asks her what to tell superiors with a curt "The truth" notwithstanding, Sicario offers a twisting and turning enterprise that keeps the audience, much like Kate herself, in the dark for quite a bit of the dangerous journey. There are some gut wrenching sequences handled pretty near perfectly here by director Denis Villeneuve, and at least a couple of the horrendous deaths that accrue throughout the film will probably catch some viewers completely off guard. The emotional content here is increasingly fraught with angst, making Sicario a bit difficult to stomach at times. Technical merits are first rate, and Sicario comes Highly recommended.