Part two of the Sicario saga begins as Border Patrol helicopters overfly the Mexican border on a starless night, their sensors picking out motion in the darkness below. As dozens of migrants clutch their belongings and make for the frontier, blinding white lights turn on them from above and from the ground as Border Patrol vehicles close in. Obeying commands, the migrants fall to the dirt with hands on their heads—except for one who runs. Realizing within seconds that he has no chance, the runner kneels and begins to pray. But he’s not invoking Our Lady of Guadalupe. He’s an Islamist terrorist and before his arrest, sets off his suicide vest.
Sicario: Day of the Soldato starts with a proverbial bang and seldom lets up. The sequel to the 2015 Oscar-nominated Sicario lands in theaters at an uncomfortable time when immigrants on the southern border and stories of their ill-treatment fills the news. In Day of the Soldato, that border is the setting for a geopolitical thriller in which a Mexican drug cartel is suspected of ferrying ISIS across the river into the U.S. In Soldato’s second scene, swarthy suicide bombers invade a store in Kansas City and blow themselves up in a storm of screams, shattered glass and alarms sounding impotently into the night.
Day of the Soldato punches the fear buttons and the first of its two protagonists comes across as a Hollywood amplification of Donald Trump’s off-with-the-gloves approach. The aptly named CIA agent Graver, played by Josh Brolin with the heart and soul of a hunk of fieldstone, warns a captive Somali pirate that waterboarding will feel good compared to what’s waiting if he doesn’t talk. “This is Africa,” he reminds the Somali, handcuffed and hooded in a Djibouti interrogation room. “I can do whatever I want to you.”
“Enhanced interrogation,” black sites in the Third World, Somali pirates… Isn’t that so last decade? Well, except for the pirates, maybe not. Perhaps Day of the Soldato is a discouraging bellwether of the national mood?
Benicio Del Toro returns from the first Sicario and his performance is the best thing about Day of the Soldato. As the vengeful linchpin of Graver’s scheme to set off a war between the Mexican cartels to thwart their alleged support of terrorism, Del Toro’s Gillick has a face that has known sadness and loss. His job is to execute the kidnapping of a kingpin’s teenage daughter, an elaborate and deadly charade choreographed to look like the work of a rival drug lord.
The screenplay complicates the situation when it reveals that the Kansas City bombers were born in New Jersey and when, following a bloody and embarrassing melee with Mexican police near the border, “POTUS doesn’t have the stomach for this,” a White House aide tells the flustered Graver. The old man in the Oval Office may have lost his nerve, but Graver persists.
Leaping with a gymnast’s agility across borders and continents, Day of the Soldato is a terse thriller whose character development is limited to the 16-year-old kingpin’s daughter (Isabela Moner), who learns about hardship and compassion on her rough journey. The macho-death cult violence of the cartels is drawn in blood and gore and the desperation of migrants is given at least a sideways glance. Also on hand is a good kid lured into the life of the coyotes by his muscle car-driving cousin. Soldato has its Dirty Harry moment when Gillick tells the mobster he just shot down on a Mexico City street to put on his glasses. Recognize me, the guy whose family you killed? “Adios” Gillick says before finishing him off. The film ends on a bleak note and the implied threat of another sequel.
