My Review Of The First Ten Minutes of “Sicario”

It’s taken a while, but given the milieu of The Devil You Don’t Know, I’ve been interested in seeing Sicario.  (It usually takes a while for me to get around to actually seeing a movie.)  I’d heard mixed reviews, but given that the trailers for Sicario, Narcos, and Ghost Recon Wildlands, all of which deal with Latin American Narcos, came out right about the same time as The Devil You Don’t Know was released, it got on my radar.  I’m not well-known enough to be able to say I set a trend with talking about the Mexican Drug War again, but the coincidental timing was interesting.

Anyway, the other night, I gave Sicario a shot.  And, as you can probably tell from the title of this post, I didn’t make it very far.  It’s bad.

The movie opens with an FBI raid on a house in Arizona.  Now, the CQB tactics and weapons handling are atrocious, but it’s Hollywood, so that’s kind of to be expected.  Annoying, but not necessarily a deal-breaker.

It’s the rest of the scenario where the wheels really start to fall off.  For all the little cinematography tricks that they use to build up how ominous the whole thing is, none of it makes any sense.  The inner walls of the house are lined with corpses, all with plastic bags over their heads, shut up inside the drywall.  There’s an IED under the shed out back that goes off and kills two officers when they cut the lock and open it.

Why would there be bodies in the walls in a house in Arizona?  Not only is it an enormously labor-intensive way to hide bodies, it’s not even a particularly effective one.  You can smell a dead rodent in the walls of a residential house, never mind about fifty human corpses.  The cartels don’t work like that.  Where have the bodies in Iguala been found?  In the landfills.  Landfills, mass graves, or even barrels of acid are better choices for disposing of bodies, and these are all things the cartels have really done.  These people might be sick bastards, but they’re not stupid.  The scenario in Sicario was stupid.

After that, I couldn’t keep going.  The scenario was nonsensical, and everything about the writing and the cinematography just seemed to be trying too hard, while simultaneously not trying hard enough.