Sicario Day of The Soldado: Dull And Disappointing

"Sicario: Day of the Soldado" is the perfect example of an inexperienced director trying to recapture the magic of a better film and, simply put, failing to do so. If you've read my article on the original "Sicario," you know I loved that movie, even if it wasn't perfect. I'd heard mixed reviews for the sequel, and despite my misgivings, I decided to give it a watch. Simply put, "Soldado" was disappointing. I don't really have a better word to describe it. It was just disappointing. That's not to say that there weren't good things about this film. There were some strong elements . And arguably, that makes the final product all the more disappointing. Stefano Sollima, a director who simply isn't at the same level as Denis Villeneuve, attempted to do something I was afraid he would do. Within the first few (very rushed) scenes, I knew exactly how this film was going to play out. Sollima wanted to capture the dark magic of the first film without ever taking the time to understand what made the first film so magical.

Point in case, in one of the first scenes of the film, Matt Graver, a familiar face for those who watched the first movie, is attempting to pry answers out of a suspected terrorist named Bashiir. He proceeds to call in drone strike after drone strike on Bashiir's family members, trying to get him to give up information about a terrorist attack we witnessed at the start of the film. One by one, he executes Bashiir's family members in front of him. It's a cold sequence, but it's lacking a crucial aspect of the first film. In the first film, our friendly neighborhood FBI agent, Kate Macer, was an observer in over her head in a world she didn't fully understand, and all the violence and depravity that played out in the first film was motivated by one simple goal: to change Kate's worldview. And because we're lacking that pivotal moral compass that Kate gave us, we're lacking a reason to care about scenes like this. We already know Bashiir is a bad dude. How exactly is doing bad things to him going to change his worldview in any way, especially in one single scene? How exactly is it supposed to do anything except make us numb to all of this violence? If the entire film had an end goal in mind, an end goal such as changing a character's worldview, it would have been a lot better. But because it cares more about shocking us than forcing us to think, it instead comes across as a futile effort by a filmmaker who wasn't qualified to be dealing with a follow-up to "Sicario."

On a more fundamental level design-wise, this movie is all over the place. Within the first ten minutes of the film, we've seen a terrorist disguised as an illegal immigrant blow himself up in front of border patrol, another group of suicide bomber terrorists blow themselves up at a department store in Missouri, a group of US Special Forces operatives raiding a house in Somalia, and the airstrike sequence I mentioned above. "Soldado" doesn't understand the concept of set-up and is instead content to throw us into this world head over heels without stopping to allow us to take in what exactly is happening. The rest of the plot doesn't slow down much. The film attempts to shove 3 hours worth of content into 2 hours of runtime, and the film really suffers because of it. If the runtime of "Soldado" was longer, we may have had a pretty good film on our hands. Instead, we have a rushed, messy, quickly-paced downer on our hands.

As something of a side note, the cinematography of "Soldado" was far inferior to the first film. Gone is the darkness and lived-in feeling of the first film, replaced with a pretty standard and even sub-par look, which is a real shame. There were a couple of scenes where the saturation was so low the film almost looked gray, and I sincerely missed the rich colors and life-like visuals of the first film.

Another problem I had with the movie was that it felt less like its own self-contained story that could stand on its own two legs and more like a set-up for a sequel that may never happen. It's almost as if the creators of the movie were so concerned with what they wanted to do with a third film they forgot that they had to make the second one first. This film ultimately lacked the heart and soul of what made the first film great, so what we ended up with was a soulless shell of its predecessor.

And, perhaps worst of all, this sequel felt exploitative, and instead of directly addressing some very real issues in this area of the world, it was content to use these hard realities as a backdrop for a pretty straightforward action flick. And I wouldn't have as much of an issue with this if the film were actually good, but this last point is pretty much a summation of what "Day of the Soldado" is: it's an exploitation of a film with superior execution and a superior grip on what it wants to do and say.

"Day of the Soldado" is ultimately a lot of good ideas executed poorly. Starting a war between the cartels by kidnapping the daughter of a cartel kingpin? That is an excellent premise. Pairing a girl up with a man who lost his daughter to those who now wish him dead? That had the potential to be an excellent character dynamic. Doubling down (or rather attempting to double down) on everything that made the first film so exciting? That seems pretty airtight to me. And in the hands of a more capable director, this film could have been even better than the first "Sicario." But, unfortunately, it's not. Not even a strong performance from the main actor Benicio Del Toro nor an eerie and hauntingly beautiful score is enough to save "Sicario: Disappointment of the Soldado."

Sicario: Day of the Soldado - 5/10

Colossians 3:23