When your revered crew of original principals doesn’t return for your sequel —director Denis Villeneuve, Emily Blunt as your star, legendary Roger Deakins as cinematographer and the late Jóhann Jóhannsson as your composer — you don’t really stand a chance. Much to its detriment, all these A-list players are absent in “Sicario: Day Of The Soldado,” and thus the drug cartel film, more action thriller than nuanced dramatic thriller this time, pales in comparison.
That’s said, original writer/creator and franchise architect, American Midwesterner Taylor Sheridan, who’s gone on to a successful directing career that feels worth watching, is still here at the wheel. And so, while ‘Soldado’ does not feature its top-shelf troupe, and maintains its problematic, arguably toxic politics, racial and traditional, for all its faults, there’s still something there. It’s an inferior, often frustrating film, it’s hard to root for, and its consideration of its people of color is dubious, even as it features them as protagonists. But nonetheless, there’s some value, especially in is visceral qualities and the chilling nihilism of its violence.
Put it this way, ‘Soldado,’ is an unsuccessful film, but an interesting mess and its long-game story arc is compellingly ambitious even as it doesn’t always work.
There’s superficial, but important parallels to Netflix’s “House Of Cards” and ‘Soldado.’ While Kevin Spacey and David Fincher were the glossy package that overshadowed everything, it was showrunner and architect Beau Willimon (“Ides of March“) who created the show. But like Villeneuve, Fincher set the tone for the show aesthetically and formally, it’s captivating tone, texture, look, and shape. Once he left, “House Of Cards” was still persuasive (until it wasn’t), but was always missing that subtle, but discernible, auteurist touch.
‘Soldado’ features a similar pattern. Villeneuve’s A+ clinical, brutalist composure is what made “Sicario” a hit and fan favorite. Continuing his ruthlessly efficient vision is Stefano Sollima (known for Italian crime thriller’s like ” Suburra” and Netflix’s “Gomorrah” series), replete with Hildur Guðnadóttir, a collaborator of Jóhannsson who unfortunately phones in a carbon copy of the anxiety-riddled score of bassy doom blasts straight from the center of hell (original, it was panic-inducing, now, it’s rote).
Much like the “House Of Cards” journeyman that followed in Fincher’s footsteps, Sollima’s job in many ways is to mimic the visual template and tenor bequeathed to him; that sweaty sense of dread, hyper-coiled tension, the panicky quicksand of futility. And for the most part, the filmmaker nails it to a tee, but that doesn’t mean the facsimile is inspired.
So, as movie dramas migrate to television and big screen films start to parrot the popular serialized storytelling of the boob tube, ‘Soldado’ is much more, “Sicario” season two; a kind of pilot episode for life beyond its original. It’s also a middle chapter where the story’s not fully told, yet is self-contained enough while pointing to a closing endgame.
To the circuitously-told film itself: Mostly set south of the U.S.-Mexico border, but near enough to possess all the electrical power of its current troubling political relevancy, ‘Soldado’ focuses on the mysterious Colombian assassin Alejandro Gillick (Benicio del Toro) and to a lesser extent, the glib, no-nonsense CIA agent Matt Graver (Josh Brolin). It’s serialized, non-traditional movie storytelling means, Graver starts the movie, but then the baton is eventually passed on to Alejandro
It also starts out as Trump’s favorite zero-tolerance movie and should only stoke more fears of border paranoia (Red State nations may love it for all the wrong reasons which makes the drama a more difficult pill to swallow). Ugly in its opening, ‘Soldado’ exploits the war on terror and Islamophobia as jumper cables to kickstart its story. Jihadists enact a terror plot on the East Coast and the machinations of global warfare mean, these men were given safe, potentially-abetted passage to the U.S. through Mexico. This is enough for the President to add the drug cartels to the list of global terror organizations. ‘Soldado’ then soon becomes about opportunistic payback —much like Saudi Arabian hijackers makes a nice excuse for “Iraq War: The Sequel, Lets Finish What We Started,” only against drug lords down South.
Through the CIA, Graves is then tasked with starting a clandestine internecine war between the cartels; let them tear themselves apart which means a princess must go missing. Graves, through the help of his merciless, ghost-like Alejandro take a trip down to Tijuana to snatch a girl who happens to be the precious daughter of a cartel kingpin. Extract the girl, cover your tracks, blame warring factions and watch them eat themselves alive from afar. Of course, this mission goes sour and ‘Soldado,’ a good 40 minutes into the film by now, truly starts (it’s as if this is the first episode of the season). Trapped in Mexico with the kidnapped girl, and without his U.S. operatives backing him (episode two), Alejandro isn’t just abandoned, the CIA orders the mission scrubbed from existence which means extremely prejudiced eradication of Alejandro and the girl (which leads to episode three and beyond…)
Sheridan’s a complex, not-always-successful writer. Seemingly sympathizing with persons of color and often featuring Caucasian abuse of power on minorities as a central conceit, even with all the empathy in the world, Sheridan manages to still do a disservice to his POCs by underserving their perspectives (see the Native American dilemma and white saviors in the well-intentioned “Wind River“). Alejandro may ultimately be the heart and soul of ‘Soldado,’ but he isn’t afforded the necessary complexity to make his character fully rich and drawn.
Worse, unlike Emily Blunt in the original, ‘Soldado’ does not feature a moral center. Or rather, it sets up Alejandro to take on shades of moral dimension, but then abandons the concept of his growing humanity in favor of its plotblocking twists and complications so often seen in television storytelling (maybe because we’ll get more in season three?). Then again, “Sicario” was morally dubious too, but at least it had some audience identification.
It’s not a popular opinion, but identity politics clouded the critical view of “Sicario,” as many thought the film abused its female lead, Emily Blunt. A fundamentally nihilistic franchise about moral rot, “Sicario” subverted the idea of an idealistic hero, as we watched in horror along with Blunt as she witnessed the total collapse of morality in the job she believed in. By the end, her entire belief system is betrayed and shattered so of course, she walks away from it all. “Sicario” in that way also resembled an old-school noir where the principled protagonist (traditionally a patsy) is swept into the undertow of moral morass, it’s hero just happened to be female and this felt nasty.
I digress. It’s this kind of complexity, along with the outstanding intensity and nerve-wracking tension that made “Sicario” such a critical and commercial hit. And while ‘Soldado,’ especially in its last act is harrowingly stressful, disturbing and magnetically taut, it still trades its angst-ridden hopelessness over subtly and character gradation. It’s final moments, while in some regards ridiculous, in concept at least, point to a season three and leave the door open and story unfinished.
However poisonous ‘Soldado’ may appear at times, it’s a bit of fascinating creature. It’s as kind of nasty, mutated, Frankenstein crossbreed of sequel and second season that’s just as angry and aghast for being experimented on as you are at it for being created in the first place. And while surely not the first second-season movie of its kind, it definitely feels like a new byproduct of the binge-watching habits modern-day viewers are becoming increasingly accustomed to far beyond the serialization of say, Marvel films. ‘Soldado’ is hard to recommend and will feel loathsome to some in a way one can’t argue with, but I’ll fully admit, I find this uncompleted experiment hard to fully discount or look away from. [C/C+]