Sicario: Day of the Soldado is White America’s Popcorn Drug War
Trigger warning: The film described above opens with a realistic, distressing images of a terrorist act. Viewer discretion is advised.
“All warfare is based on the art of deception,” or so Chinese warlord Sun Tzu wrote over two millennia before the United States’ decades-long war on drugs. Director Stefano Sollima’s Sicario: Day of the Soldado seems just as gifted in the art of misdirection, burying its true intentions among its many twists and turns. Packed to the brim with action and a wealth of powerful performances, I left the theater not quite clear on what war Day of the Soldado is fighting, save for Hollywood’s own preoccupation with film franchising.
Some time after the events of Sicario, Day of the Soldado follows federal agent Matt Graver (Josh Brolin) and hitman Alejandro Gillick (Benicio del Toro) as they join an all-out war on the Mexican drug cartels with the U.S. government’s blessing. The only rule? There are no rules.
The film’s most immediate problems lie in its incompatibility with director Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario. Described by cast member Jeffrey Donovan as a “stand-alone spin-off” of Villeneuve’s 2015 drama, Sollima’s grisly action-thriller feels like a strange coupling of geopolitics and fast-paced action porn that misses the point its source material.
Day of the Soldado, as its title would imply, is a drastic shift in tone from what was set. The film is too impatient to scratch its itchy trigger finger rather than exploit the slow-paced tension that lent such a menace to Sicario’s most intense moments. The difference is as apparent as Sollima’s appetite for bullet-ridden spectacle, which is entertaining in a way that feels inappropriate for the film’s gut-wrenching opening.
Whereas Villeneuve gave audiences a nuanced criticism of America’s immigration and drug policies, Sollima swaps out the cloak and dagger intrigue for explosions, gun battles, and mixed-messaging. People die horribly, but they also quip “audios” Schwarzenegger-style. It’s that kind of misplaced swagger that make it seem like part of a different cinematic universe than the one in its name.
That Sollima draws on a different craft to retread much of Vileneuve’s work is doubly problematic. The new characters here are mostly easy substitutes for what we’ve seen previously, including misguided youth Miguel Hernandez (Elijah Rodriguez) standing in for Sicario’s corrupt police officer, Silvio (Maximiliano Hernández), as a victim of the cartel’s influence. In truth, Day of the Soldado is two great stories in one film — one about family and revenge, another about militant policing.
Yet Gillick and Reyes’s unlikely bond by the film’s latter half feels so removed from the film’s earlier mission, which casts Brolin in his element as the laconic Graver, who remains more a backseat driver than lead protagonist. Overall, the film loses focus on just what mission its soldiers are on.
While Day of the Soldado intelligently discusses corruption on both sides of the border, it bounces back and forth between criticizing political fear-mongering all while validating the paranoia behind the deep state and false flag operations. Granted, such things may seem increasingly more plausible in our own crazy world and Day of the Soldado feels eerily timely in its commentary.
The film’s greatest dilemma lies squarely on its characterization of the film’s breakout star, Isabel Reyes (Isabela Moner), the adolescent daughter of a Mexican drug lord responsible — in part— for the chaos spilling over the Mexican-American border. Much like Sicario’s Kate Macer (Emily Blunt), Reyes lends a face to the human toll of the drug war.
But unlike Macer, a tragic heroine and moral compass as Graver’s partner, Reyes has neither the agency nor the complexity to be an active participant or vocal critic. There is indeed a very real crisis on America’s borders, but Day of the Soldado unwittingly exploits its youngest victims to further the story beats of their oppressors.
Instead, Reyes spends most of her time a helpless victim amidst the horrific violence she experiences, her haunting cries demanding a kind of superficial sympathy from an audience Sollima assumes will react to a child in schoolgirl clothes than the issues Day of the Soldado initially puts forward. Moner’s heart-wrenching performance, which would be a feat for actresses twice her age, seems little more than a means of endorsing her male saviors’ machismo than subverting the stereotypes of the film’s onscreen Mexican immigrants.
Essentially, Day of the Soldado demands the sympathy of white audiences as a story about the white men leading the drug war rather than the onscreen immigrants they disproportionately affect. The film’s diverse new cast members have few opportunities to be more than literal passengers for their time onscreen. Del Toro, whose character is dumbed down to something of a comic book antihero, offers an otherwise inspired performance amidst the film’s most emotionally difficult scenes.
There are a number of things to admire about Day of the Solado. Dariusz Wolski’s tight camerawork does wonders for the film’s hellish scenery and Jóhann Jóhannsson’s score adds a subtle tension to the action. Yet all of these seem trivial compared to the film’s cookie-cutter kidnapping story that feels more reminiscent of hastily written bargain-bin material.
If judged on its merits as an action-thriller alone, Day of the Soldado deserves high marks. Sollima’s slick direction shines enough to validate the idea of him helming a Call of Duty film. But as a continuation of such an unlikely franchise, the film pays tribute to its source material in all the wrong ways, let alone its incredulous tease at future installments.
For all its thematic faults, Day of the Soldado is an unforgettable theater experience with thrills every step of the way. But as much timely discussion it may spark about one of America’s longest domestic conflicts, it falls short of its potential of being something greater than simple popocorn entertainment.
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