For the week of October 1st, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment is bringing Sicario: Day of the Soldado to Blu-ray. Parts of Soldado (I'm calling this film by its original title 'cause the Sicario 4K-branded one is quite dumb) are effective, if we're grading it as an action movie. Director Stefano Sollima (son of the iconic Spaghetti Western director Sergio Sollima) pulls off an armed-convoy ambush mid-film that is, in its own way, as effective as anything in Denis Villeneuve's original Sicario: it is a masterclass in withholding and revealing visual information, with DP Dariusz Wolski panning his camera from left to right until we're too terrified to arrive at whatever fresh hell is assaulting the antiheroes just off-frame. It helps, too, that Sollima has a Tom Clancy-like yen for techno-espionage. He loves relaying the particulars of Josh Brolin and Benicio Del Toro's covert operatives through night-vision goggles, security footage, satellite relays, and drone coverage. All that said, the further I find myself from Soldado, the less I like it. Sollima and screenwriter Taylor Sheridan (Sheridan is lucky Yellowstone aired this year to remind people he's still a talented writer) open with back-to-back terrorist attacks set around the U.S.-Mexico border: a Middle-Eastern jihadist first detonates himself after a disastrous border crossing, and then four suicide bombers blow up inside a Kansas City supermarket. As pieces of filmmaking, these sequences are brutally effective (the supermarket attack plays out in one agonizing long take); as political agitprop, they're trafficking in rabid and irresponsible fear-mongering about the perils of weak borders. Eventually, the film's portrays its government spies as more venal than any terrorist (Catherine Keener's opportunistic black-ops coordinator informs us that the suicide bombers we saw were actually American citizens), but these clarifications come as after-thoughts, throwaway lines designed to let Soldado try and straddle both sides of the political spectrum. And while the film's politics are problematic, its handling of Brolin and Del Toro is just idiotic. These two were the bad guys in the last movie, and I'd respect a Soldado that followed them to the darkest parts of the human condition. Instead, Sheridan can't even commit to Sicario's nihilistic integrity, and he contorts Soldado into formulaic tripe. Sheridan turns Del Toro's lethal assassin into a protector for Isabela Moner's angry cartel kid through the hoariest of tropes (Moner reminds Del Toro of his murdered daughter), and then, after doing everything he can to soften Del Toro, he undoes all this forced growth to set up another sequel. And don't get me started on Brolin! Let's just say that the guy we meet in his big introduction (gleefully issuing drone strikes against a frightened pirate's family members) wouldn't pull the massive punch he does at the climax. His arc feels brought to you by Studio Notes: "Brolin is bad, sure, but does he have to be that bad?" It's a perplexingly awful choice. Like making a sequel to Sicario.
From Universal Studios Home Entertainment comes The First Purge. It's hard to believe this franchise started as a fairly straightforward home-invasion thriller à la The Strangers. I'm not sure series creator James DeMonaco meant to give these junky slashers any real-world frisson (part of me thinks he engineered the whole Purge concept solely so Ethan Hawke and Co. in the first movie would have a good reason for not calling the cops), but he's leaned into the sociopolitical angle more and more with each successive entry. The First Purge is so didactic it might make Michael Moore uncomfortable. Here, DeMonaco flashes back to the Purge test-run in Staten Island. A sociologist (Marisa Tomei, wasted) wants to use it to study herd aggression, but the far-right-wing New Founding Fathers of America intend to have the Purge further disenfranchise poor people and minorities. When the Staten Islanders don't respond as violently as the NFFA hopes, the government releases black-op death squads to provide justification for further Purges. These details are heightened, but the way Wag the Dog was heightened. Again, we're a long way from simple stalk-and-slash. That said, as with the previous Purge entry Election Year, I do wish The First Purge had more cinematic verve. Gerard McMurray took over directing duties from DeMonaco, and while he's got a better eye (McMurray lets you see more of what's happening, whereas DeMonaco preferred to hack his action coverage more violently than his masked antagonists), he doesn't do much in terms of crafting memorable setpieces or interesting camera movements. The big showstopper is a stairwell fight sequence between drug kingpin Dmitri (Y'Lan Noel, who's going to be a huge movie star, if this film is any indication) and three government assassins, and the scene works because Noel is so charismatic more than anything McMurray does in blocking/staging. If Blumhouse got to upgrade from its meager budgets (this movie cost $13 million), a little more money might afford more in the way of action - we get almost fifty minutes of preamble before the chaos really begins - or at least something more for the female characters to do. As cool as Noel is, Lex Scott Davis is basically a damsel in distress, while Luna Lauren Velez and Kristen Solis serve as frightened foils for the heroes and little else. And for god's sake, dial down whatever Rotimi Paul is doing as Skeletor, a deranged crackhead who becomes the most enthusiastic Purger. You can't take him seriously, and he's supposed to be one of the film's Biggest Bads. However, it's saying something that The First Purge's ideas are incendiary enough to paper over moments of genuine storytelling incompetence.
Speaking of television, Kino Video is offering Blu-rays of the classic TV movies The Night Stalker and its sequel The Night Strangler. I wonder if people today will get the same charge out of these two that audiences got back in 1972 and 1973. I'd characterize both as charming-but-quaint. In each case, we follow eccentric journalist Carl Kolchak (the great Darren McGavin) as he investigates murders with supernatural undertones: in The Night Stalker, Kolchak is hunting a killer who drains victims of all their blood (hmm...), while The Night Strangler involves a series of killings that seem to follow a twenty-one-year cycle. Both are calibrated for television pacing (lots of commercial act breaks), and outside of writer Richard Matheson's dry witticisms and McGavin's wonderfully rumpled turn, none of the twists and turns prove all that surprising. However, these films matter more for their legacy than for any of their specific content. Without The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler, I'm not sure we ever arrive at the genre-flavored procedural. Shows like The Twilight Zone offered horror and sci-fi thrills, but they were anthology-based, whereas Kolchak acted like a hard-boiled cop or detective from Dragnet, the difference being, of course, that Joe Friday never went after a vampire or body snatcher. You can draw a direct line between Kolchak and Twin Peaks or The X-Files - matter of fact, X-Files creator Chris Carter tried (unsuccessfully) to get McGavin to play Kolchak alongside Mulder and Scully. Think about all the shows The X-Files inspired; it all leads back to The Night Stalker.