Sicario: Day of the Soldado
A pox on all these people. Disgusting extreme right wing propaganda, a Trump-era plot where Islamic terrorists are coming through the Southern Border, leaving prayer rugs lying around? Alejandro is now a good guy and the spook has feelings? Just no.
This is a random parroting of pieces of dialogue from Sicario, interspersed with protracted shootouts, and the kid screaming. The plot is a clothesline for the set pieces, nicked from the greatest hits from the other true film. The visuals and audio are an absolute ripoff from Roger Deakins and Jóhann Jóhannson. What kind of psycho sees Sicario and thinks Matt and Alejandro the heroes?
Remember when Mohammed Atta interrupted 9/11 to pray to Allah in the correct way? Was this written by a Westboro Baptist Church guy, does he think everyone is a religious nutter? Yemeni terrorists, if existed, would clearly by motivated by a random family wedding or schoolyard football game being blown up by a trigger-happy Predator operator, in an AC room in Nevada.
Opens straight out of a Fox News oracle: Yemeni terrorists are being smuggled to Mexico by Somalian pirates, then hiring coyotes to get them to Kansas City, so they cam blow themselves up in a strip mall. The guys bring Islamic prayer rugs with them, for fuck’s sake.
The Secretary of Defense (Pete Hegseth, the Yeltsin LARPer) summons Matt to deal with it, as a black op. He cites Iraq by name, that went so well. For logistics, since he’s in DC, Erik Prince is the guy, America’s Prigozhin.
Meanwhile, a Chicano middle class kid who lives in the borderlands is lured into cartel smuggling, since he is American. No reason is given why a middle class kid with a loving mother would skip school and hang out with his deadbeat tattooed cousin, this is just plain weird.
The CIA wants to start a cartel war (again), so they kidnap the daughter of the leader, and extremely coddled and pampered young chick. She is introduced in her high-end Catholic rich people school beating the shit out of a foreign kid, and pulling the “you know who my father is” to the principal without saying a freaking word.
Everything is so brazen, they seem to have predicted the Trump administration. They bring a kidnapped Mexican national to a US Air Force Base! They store satellite footage of themselves murdering Mexican nationals in Mexican soil. “That was fucking illegal, you wanna start a war”.
But it’s much more insidious. Alejandro cosplays as DEA and “rescues” her from the evil doers! A lot of noise and SWAT teams. Yo dawg, I heard you liked copaganda, so I put some copaganda in your copaganda. Meta-propaganda, hilarious.
But it’s a fuck up. When they are about to drop her off in Mexico, on a strategic location to maximise gang war potential, they are ambushed by the cops themselves, and cartel dudes with RPG (and a six figures Chevy, with leather seats). You would think they would afford a Javelin, the US was giving those away (Wide Receiver/Fast and Furious).
The president is afraid of the media and shuts it down (again with the fascist “JFK abandoned the Bay of Pigs guys” mythos, incredible). Hegseth dresses them down, remotely, and delegates the bad news on Gina Haspel. The CIA top brass is now saying clean it up completely, murder the kid and Alejandro, dissolve the bodies, whatever.
Turns the alleged Yemeni bombers are citizens from New Jersey, so Matt wasted millions and killed dozens of people for nothing. And now he needs to waste Alejandro. Instead of quitting on the spot, is he willing to betray his most prized asset?
Alejandro reached the girl at least, and now is doing The Last of Us towards America. Meeting a deaf guy to develop his character, make sure he’s not a murderous psychopath, like the last time. He gets a call from Matt saying he is fired. Alejandro sees her own daughter is Reyes (just like Kate), but this time he’s not willing to blow her brains out.
Through cunning, Alejandro pays some coyotes to get them stateside, but the middle class kid rats him out, that small operation now holds Isabel Reyes as hostage. Since they are dumb, they will try to sell her down the river, and Alejandro is shot by the middle class kid to make him a sicario. On their victory lap, out middle class kid seems affected by the killing (Death Wish-style) and gets back home on foot. Matt comes with the two Black Hawks from Academi and blasts the gangbangers, but keeps the girl.
Alejandro survives being shot in the cheek and tracks down the middle class kid an year later, now all tattooed and rocking diamond earrings, like a fucking pimp. He “talks about his future”, I’m guessing training the guy to murder Gina Haspel and the rest of the intelligence upper echelon. Matt disobeyed a direct order, so will need to grovel to Erik Prince for a demotion.
In Sicario, after Alejandro murders the dirty cop and also two boys and cartel leader’s wife in front of him. Meanwhile, he probably enrolled in a mindfulness course, so he will sacrifice himself for a kid that reminded him of his daughter. Sure, he had feeling for Kate, but he still shot her, threatened her for pointing her gun at him and would have blown her brains out in the ending, without remorse. Alejandro has feelings, but not exactly human-like.
I can see why Benicio del Toro and Josh Brolin came back, this is a proper film with proper story arcs for them. Sure, it’s a retcon from the last one, but whatevs. The pregnant girl from Alien: Romulus doesn’t have much to do but scream. The other cool guy also returns, the one with all the good quips. This time, he has less funny asides like “getting a boner” or “this won’t even make the papers in El Paso”.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.