"Sicario: Day of the Soldado" Review
"Sicario: Day of the Soldado" is written by Taylor Sheridan and is a continuation to one of the movies from his frontier trilogy. Stefano Sollima takes over as director and Dariusz Wolski takes over as cinematographer (you may recognize his work in a bunch of Ridley Scott, Tim Burton and Gore Verbinski Pirates of the Caribbean movies). Although the characters are rich and interesting and complicated (things that I love), they are framed in such a way that makes it hard for me to follow. What made the first Sicario so great is that the narrative is primarily focused on Emily Blunt's character. We know what she knows and we find out what she finds out roughly at the same time. She's naive and gets pushed around and we in turn feel like we've been had by the end of that movie. With its sequel, we follow four different characters in roughly three different narratives. I really liked the teenage girl character in this (played by Isabela Moner whom gives an incredibly powerful performance) and I was rooting for her story. This made up about a third of the movie and for the other two thirds of it, I felt lost in the script's abyss of morally ambiguous characters with nothing else to cling onto but Benicio del Toro and Josh Brolin's performances. These parts do eventually come together and some of it works but a lot of it didn't. The final act specifically felt like a cop out and the ending is unintentionally cheesy.
With the exception of a claustrophobic set piece that takes place on a dirt road in the middle of the movie, Sicario 2 looks bland and pales in comparison to the highly calculated editing, shot compositions, and direction of the first movie. Tension is still present but it's not nearly as tight as its predecessor.
The musical motifs from the first film from the late Jóhann Jóhannsson return, though, instead of not knowing what's going to happen and hearing the dread in the score, Hildur Guðnadóttir's score feels similar and recontextualizes the dread. We know what some of these characters are like and vaguely where things are going this time around and the music feels very on-the-edge and grotesque. It's a very effective score for sure and it elevates the drama of the scenes where it's incorporated.
Day of the Soldado isn't as polished from a filmmaking standout as the first Sicario. Instead, it feels like a standard Hollywood movie which I'm pretty sure is the last thing that a Sicario movie wants to be.