If drugs were legal, Hollywood would have to find new stories. The Godfather, Scarface, The Departed — any gangster film — orbit around drugs. But so do many movies far and in between like True Romance, No Country for Old Men, or Spring Breakers. Even big-budget comedies like 21 (and 22) Jump Street, The Hangover (and Parts II and III), We’re the Millers, The Heat, and Hot Pursuit (The Heat) rely on the illegal drug trade to propel story. Why?
Every story needs strong protagonists and antagonists and illegal drugs creates both where they might not otherwise exist. A petty thief is a villain, but not a strong villain. A strong villain is one who has amassed great wealth, power, and network. There are few rackets besides drugs in which a criminal could accumulate all that. And those villains and their gangs simply wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for a system that empowered unscrupulous people.
These villains are natural Big Bads of law enforcement protagonists, who, apart from the occasional murder perhaps (Fincher would remain employed), would have mostly broken windows to investigate if it weren’t for illegal drugs. There’d be no undercover work, informers, raids — nothing too cool.
Illegal drugs, thankfully for film, make for less binary scenarios too. Becoming a dealer is often the best option out of a ton of bad options for would-be saints. Cops often cooperate with drug dealers to investigate other crime and perverse incentives can drive them to the dark side. Even average people have to interact with criminals and/or become criminals themselves in order to possesses and use drugs (note to reader: are you technically a criminal?).
Yes, illegal drugs have it all. Every story requires conflict and illegal drugs are an engine of conflict. Who would be the potential loose canon but somewhat reasonable intermediary to the much worse bad guy if it weren’t for drug dealers? Whose business would our heroes accidentally intrude upon if it weren’t for drug gangs — the Jets and the Sharks? Illegal drugs are the gateway conflict. They’re the ultimate contrivance. Not just in fiction, but in real life where we have manufactured a systemic problem where the criminalization of drugs affect the multitudes and the pitfalls of drug abuse has become an afterthought.
So, now there is a war movie where the enemy is not another nation or terrorist group, but opportunists exploiting a limited supply of what much of our country demands, and we don’t seem to acknowledge the difference. The War on Drugs has become literal and that doesn’t seem odd. This is why Sicario reads like a Kathryn Bigelow film. It focuses on a specialized military unit in contained high-octane situations, and it even has Bigelow’s Avatar Emily Blunt at the helm. But unlike Hurt Locker (2008) and Zero Dark Thirty (2012), which say a lot about what war does to people without passing much judgment on policy, Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario conveys a concrete message: the United States’ War on Drugs enables villains and waging it is futile.
When a drug cartel insulating suburban Arizona houses with corpses moves in on her home turf, Blunt’s FBI agent Kate Mercer is at first tantalized by the shadowy Matt Graver (Josh Brolin) and the shadowier Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro). Graver and Alejandro have unknown employers and almost omniscient intelligence. They say they need Kate’s help attacking the root of the cartel’s evil. Above all, Kate wants law and order — she respects jurisdictions and wants to gather evidence for a prosecutable case against drug traffickers. But Graver wants to conduct off-book operations in Mexico and work with nearly-as-bad criminals in the name of taking down Escobar/El Chapo/El Chingnon/whoever it will be next.
Kate’s protestations to Graver’s methods seem out of order at first. Kate says she’s not a soldier, but her uniform might as well be an ExoSuit. As viewers (and as citizens), we have come to expect elite teams invading sovereign land to takedown a big bad. So, what is Kate even talking about? A sequence that highlights the absurdity of America carrying out what amounts to a dangerous military operation just minutes from El Paso is not that jarring. We do this sorts of stuff all the time.
Even after Kate learns Graver brought her along simply for bureaucratic cover, she wants to see the mission through. Jóhann Jóhannsson’s unrelenting percussive score beats forward despite a heavy and menacing pressure indicating it not. Roger Deakin’s transitions the film’s photography from bleak desert obstinance into complete darkness. Deep in the bowels of a desert tunnel, Kate learns that Graver’s long game is to replace the cartel leader with Alejandro because Alejandro’s competing cartel will keep the violence south of the border. She vows to whistle blow. And a lengthy sequence where Alejandro ruthlessly dispatches his enemies (and a few innocents) to claim power shows she’d be right to.
In the end, though, Alejandro himself gives Kate an ultimatum: legally sign off on the operation or die. Kate relents, but not before aiming her sights and getting a clear shot at Alejandro as he leaves her apartment. She decides not to take it. Like Americans allowing the Drug War, she has seen firsthand what trying to stop drugs does to border cities and, like our inner cities, has even been harmed herself. But she decides not take the shot because a part of her believed that enabling some evil was better than losing the moral victory. And now having lost both she is paralyzed.
One with Blunt’s Edge of Tomorrow superfighter character in mind might have thought Kate poised to vanquish all enemies. Instead, Kate becomes nothing more than a hapless, naivé observer who is thoroughly used and beaten down — by her supposed allies. She’s pummeled, choked, shot, threatened, and left heaving on the ground more than once. She can’t get anywhere. She can’t fight back. Perhaps Sicario should also rebrand as Live Die Repeat.
Until 30% of Americans stop buying and snorting drugs, Brolin’s Graver character says, questionable methods of stopping the proliferation of them are sound because the ends justify the means. We’re all too beaten down to remember that we can fix this problem because we’re the ones who created it.