Sicario (2015) Movie Review - Criminalizing Drugs Leads To Corruption In All Aspects Of Society

Sicario (2015) Movie Review - Criminalizing Drugs Leads To Corruption In All Aspects Of Society

Cultural Criticism - November 18, 2018

2018.11.18.

I watched "Sicario" last night. The video service's description caught my attention:"[a] taut, critically acclaimed thriller filled with pulse-pounding suspense. After an idealistic FBI agent (Emily Blunt) is recruited by a government task-force official (Josh Brolin) to pursue a drug lord, she begins a perilous mission that forces her to question everything she believes--and pits her against a shadowy consultant (Benicio Del Toro) with a dangerous agenda."

I do like intelligent, fast moving, well-filmed, smartly edited movies with something to say. Nine out of ten movies I watch I turn off by the twenty minutes mark, never to return. But this movie engaged me. I watched the movie all the way through in one sitting, which is rare for me.

I want this to be a brief review. I am not going to recount the entire story. You can find out for yourself if you watch it. I want to summarize some of the aspects of the movie that standout the most for me.

Here's the most important takeaway: The war on drugs corrupts and destroys everyone. It starts with the criminalization of the twenty percent of the population that enjoys recreating or self-medicating with naturally occuring substances like marijuana and cocaine that ought to be legal. The drug war corrpts law enforcement. You see a highly regarded state trooper in Texas who is on the take from a drug cartel. You see state and federal police in Mexico working for the cartels. Everyone is being bribed or coerced in some way. It seems that the powers that be want fear to be the predominating emotion in society rather than the (temporary) peace and ecstasy that some of these drugs can give you.

The Del Toro character is bent on destroying one of the cartels after his wife was decapitated and daughter thrown into a vat of acid. The movie does not depict this. It only makes referent to this fact to establish the character's motivation.

The state trooper segment was particularly troubling. He seemed like such an honest, healthy, "All-American" guy. He had won awards for his service. He and the Emily Blunt character hit it off in a bar. They are seen kissing passionately and about to make love when she sees a special rubber band used to bind cartel cash empty from his pockets. When she tries to push him off he begins to choke her to death until Del Toro intervenes. He knew that Blunt was an FBI agent causing trouble for the cartels and the whole thing had been a ruse on his part to find out what she knew. The scene revealed the depths to which goodness and passion can be twisted to serve evil. The trooper later stated that his family had been threatened as leverage to his agreeing to be bought off. I would say that when you can no longer do the "right thing" in your line of work, you should walk away. But that is likely easier said than done, for financial, safety, and other reasons.

The desire for revenge is what motivates Del Toro. He wants above all else to kill Manuel Diaz, the leader of the cartel who ordered the hit on his family. This desire sustains Del Toro through many harrowing encounters. At the end Del Toro shoots Diaz's two sons and wife at the dinner table of personal estate. It's a bit of a super hero affair, in that Del Toro kills numerous people in order to get up front and personal with Diaz.

A character at some point in the movie states that killing the leader of a cartel leads to even more violence as rival factions bid for dominance. So killing Diaz, though satisfying to Del Toro in a personal sense, will likely lead to a greater loss of life.

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Comment

Note that the "war on drugs" is only against those drugs the government and elite financial interests wish to criminalize. In 2018 America, alcohol, cigarettes, and hundreds of addictive prescription medications using toxic fluoride as the active ingredient -- that eats holes in your brain -- are all legal. Pills for pain or mood alteration to deal with anxiety, depression, and so forth are all okay provided they are given to you by the pharmaceutical industry and the Rockefeller-controlled American Medical Association. But if you try to use a plant that can be grown by yourself in the ground in your backyard or under growlights in the kitchen -- such as marijuana, peyote, cocaine, or heroin -- the front door of your house will be torn down at 4:00am by a SWAT team and your assets confiscated.

When I was just four or five years old in the late 1960s I drove from San Francisco, California to Guadalajara, Mexico, (a one way distance of over 2000 miles) twice: Once with my mother and godmother, and once with my mother, grandmother, and younger brother. My mother was a free spirit. We went through Mazatlan each time. We even ran out of gas in the Mexican desert. Never once did we feel threatened. But this was before the American drug war and the US dumping of below market priced genetically modified corn and other products on the market in Mexico, forcing millions of subsistence farmers into poverty and off their land.