Beautiful and horrific, Denis Villeneuve’s 2015 drug-war thriller Sicario embodies the spirit of the decade. Terrorism, cartel violence, government malfeasance, and state-sponsored assassinations are the themes of Sicario, as they are themes of American global politics.
That is why it is the best film of the 2010s. That and because it is an excellent movie.
As the first installment in screenwriter Taylor Sheridan’s “frontier trilogy” exploring the new American West (the other two entries being 2016’s Hell or High Water and 2017’s Wind River), Sicario has many of the traditional elements of a classic Western, including that it teeters Sergio Leone-style between precisely paced moments of tension and violence. And like a good Western, Villeneuve’s vision of life on the southern border is equal parts beautiful and miserable. Between breathtaking visuals of beatific sunsets and broad, sweeping vistas, the film thrusts the viewer face-first into the oppressive heat and dust of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. You can practically taste the sweat.
As an exploration of the longstanding conflict between the U.S. government and the drug cartels, Sicario wastes no time getting to the point. The film opens with an armored police vehicle barreling through the streets of a suburban neighborhood in Chandler, Arizona, stopping only after it caves in the front of a suspected cartel safe house. The film’s protagonist, FBI agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt), nearly has her head blown off in the ensuing raid. Law enforcement officials then stumble upon several bodies entombed in the walls of the besieged home. Moments later, a nearby explosive device detonates, maiming and killing multiple police officers. This all happens within the first seven minutes of the movie.
It is a devastatingly effective introductory sequence not only because it captures and holds the audiences’ undivided attention, but also because it sets the correct tone for the film, which tracks Macer’s evolution from idealistic boy scout to horrified tagalong in a shadowy government task force charged with striking back at the cartels. The opening moments are representative also of the film’s strong narrative structure, which succeeds in putting the viewer directly in the protagonist’s shoes. Because we feel Macer’s terror and confusion as her cohort literally peels back the drywall in the safe house, exposing the decaying bodies of both male and female victims, we are prepared now to share in her experiences as she metaphorically peels back the layers of deceit and secrecy masking the federal government’s blood-soaked conspiracy to manage cartel violence.
Blunt shines as the naive FBI agent. Josh Brolin, meanwhile, is terrific as the infuriatingly self-satisfied CIA operative Matt Graver, while Benicio del Toro’s turn as the titular soft-spoken “sicario,” Alejandro Gillick, is especially chilling. Everything is elevated further by Sheridan’s whip-smart script and the late Johann Johannsson’s hypnotic, simple, powerful, and terrifying score.
Its technical and narrative merits accounted for, Sicario also earns “best of the decade” for its ability to capture the mood and fears of the time. Just as 2008’s The Dark Knight is a snapshot of post-9/11 America as it grappled with the question of whether it is better to be free or safe, Sicario is a snapshot of an America that learned all the wrong lessons from that debate. It is an America where leadership has surrendered its responsibilities to defend and protect to unmanned drones, black sites, and duplicitous career bureaucrats.
In real life, the 2010s opened with the U.S. government’s extrajudicial execution of two American citizens in Yemen, and they will close with the revelation that U.S. officials have lied for 18 years about the supposed progress in the war in Afghanistan, a fatal, multitrillion-dollar conflict that Washington privately believes is unwinnable. Between these bookends lies the Justice Department’s secret scheme to allow firearms to be sold to the Mexican drug cartels, the rise and fall of the Islamic State, hundreds of civilians killed by U.S. drone strikes, a crisis of mass immigration, and the assassination of Osama bin Laden. The current U.S. president, who ran as an immigration hawk, is also mulling whether to label the drug cartels as terrorist organizations following the slaughter of a Mormon family in northern Mexico.
The 2010s are a decade defined by clandestine government action, deception, misdirection, collateral damage, and global terror. It has been a decade of unaccountable government officials zealously enforcing ambiguous agendas, sometimes with disastrous and deadly consequences.
In Sicario’s third act, after Macer sees things she “should not have seen,” Graver says in reference to the infamous Colombian drug cartel: “Medellin? Medellin refers to a time when one group controlled every aspect of the drug trade, providing a measure of order that we could control.”
That last line — “providing a measure of order that we could control” — neatly sums up American domestic and foreign policy for at least the last 20 years.
Like the 2010s, a decade that began on the high hopes of meaningful change in Washington, Sicario starts with a bang and ends with a disillusioned whimper. In between, there is terror, betrayal, death, and men chasing the illusion of control. This is the world in which Macer finds herself, wondering eventually what it means to be the “good guys.”
Though critics and fans often cite Sicario’s final line as its greatest (“You will not survive here. You are not a wolf. This is the land of wolves.”), it is a different remark that asks the film’s most pressing question.
“F— are we doing?” Macer cries as her American colleagues kill eight suspected cartel operatives in broad daylight near a border checkpoint.
No one seems to know.
