Sicario 2: Soldado (2018)

Warning: vague spoilers ahead.

There's a general rule to storytelling: you don't use luck to get you out of a hole because it will make the audience groan.

There's a key moment in Sicario 2 that although plausible relies far too heavily on luck. The director has explained how they went to great pains to make sure it could happen, but whether it could is not really the problem.

Stick the scene at the beginning of the film and it's not a problem. Place it where they did and it's a moment that can disrupt your audience's suspension of disbelief.

Of course the thing to realise with Sicario is it's about as realistic as the Dark Knight films. Certainly it carries at time the air of verisimilitude, but this is just a regular action film with more moral ambiguity and better cinematography than most.

The film plays with the current concerns over the Mexico-USA border, which could have been a valuable subject if it had chosen to examine the situation properly. Instead it's merely serves to bring in the guns and helicopters, and doesn't really gives us much more social commentary than 'gangs are bad, but so are US politicians'.

Ultimately, the exploitation of the of subject matter, at this time, cheapens the film in my eyes.

That's not to say I hated the film. The action scenes are very well staged. There's a lovely performance by Isabela Moner as the daughter of a Mexican drug lord, and the scenes between her and Benicio del Toro worked well, and for my money the film would have been better served if it had focused more on that part of the story.

Visually it looks great too and is definitely worth watching on the big screen. It's just a shame that it missed the opportunity to do something really great.