Sicario is the best movie of the decade

"Sicario" is a snapshot of an America that has aged poorly in the second decade of the "war on terror."

Beautiful and horrific, Denis Villeneuve’s 2015 drug-war thriller Sicario is the best movie of the 2010s.

It is skillfully written, acted, and directed. Every beat is perfect. Every scene serves a purpose. Every visual is worth a second look. Even the soundtrack is first-rate.

More important than these features, however, are the film’s core themes: terrorism, cartel brutality, government malfeasance and duplicity, and state-sponsored violence. From the pool of movies produced in the last 10 years, Sicario boasts of the most unflinchingly honest, and relevant, depiction of America on the world stage, which is why it deserves first place in a crowded field.

As the first installment in screenwriter Taylor Sheridan's “frontier trilogy” exploring the new American West (the other two entries being 2016’s Hell or High Water and 2017’s Wind River), Sicario has many of the traditional elements of a classic Western. It teeters Sergio Leone-style between precisely paced moments of tension and violence. Like any good Western, Villeneuve’s vision of life on the southern border is also equal parts beautiful and wretched. Between spectacular visuals of beatific sunsets and broad, sweeping vistas, the film thrusts the viewer face-first into the oppressive heat and dust of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. You can practically taste the sweat.

As an exploration of the longstanding conflict between the U.S. government and the drug cartels, Sheridan's script wastes no time getting to the point. The film opens with an armored police vehicle barreling through the streets of a suburban neighborhood in Chandler, Arizona, stopping only after it caves in the front of a cartel safe house. The film’s protagonist, gung-ho FBI agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt), nearly has her head blown off in the ensuing raid. Law enforcement officials then stumble upon several bodies entombed in the walls of the besieged home. Moments later, a nearby explosive device detonates, maiming and killing multiple U.S. law enforcement officials. This all happens within the first seven minutes of the movie.

It is a pitch-perfect introductory sequence because it sets the tone for the rest of the film, which tracks Macer’s evolution from idealistic girl scout to disillusioned tagalong in a shadowy government task force charged with striking back at the cartels. The opening moments also establish the film’s overall narrative structure. During the film’s first minutes, the audience is made to feel Macer’s terror and confusion as her cohort literally peels back the drywall in the safe house, exposing the decaying bodies of the cartel’s victims. Having experienced this, the audience is prepared now to follow Macer’s journey through the remainder of the film, feeling what she feels as she metaphorically peels back the layers of deceit and secrecy masking the federal government’s blood-soaked conspiracy to manage cartel violence.

Blunt shines as the naive FBI agent. Josh Brolin is terrific as the infuriatingly self-satisfied CIA operative Matt Graver. Benicio del Toro’s turn as the titular soft-spoken “sicario,” Alejandro Gillick, is especially chilling.

Everything is elevated further by Sheridan’s whip-smart script, the outstanding visuals provided by Villeneuve and cinematographer Roger Deakins, and the late Johann Johannsson’s hypnotic and terrifying score.

Its technical and narrative merits accounted for, Sicario also earns “best of the decade” for its skill in capturing the mood and fears of the time. Just as 2008’s The Dark Knight is a snapshot of post-9/11 America’s struggle with the question of whether it is better to be free or safe, Sicario is a snapshot of an America that learned all the wrong lessons from that debate. It is a snapshot of an America where Congress has delegated its duty to defend and protect to unmanned drones, black sites, and two-faced career bureaucrats.

In real life, the 2010s opened with the U.S. government's extrajudicial execution of two American citizens in Yemen. The 2010s will close with the revelation U.S. officials have lied for 18 years about the supposed progress in the war in Afghanistan, a deadly, multitrillion-dollar conflict Washington privately believes is unwinnable. Between these bookends lies the Justice Department's secret scheme to allow firearms to be sold to the Mexican drug cartels, the rise and fall of the Islamic State, hundreds of civilians killed by U.S. drone strikes, a crisis of mass immigration, and the assassination of Osama bin Laden. The current U.S. president, who ran as an immigration hawk, is also mulling whether to designate the drug cartels as “terrorist organizations” following the slaughter of a Mormon family in northern Mexico.

The 2010s are a decade defined by clandestine government action, deception, misdirection, collateral damage, and global terror. It has been a decade of unaccountable government officials zealously enforcing ambiguous agendas, sometimes with disastrous and deadly consequences. Sicario depicts all this and more in just a little over two hours.

In the film’s third act, after Macer sees things she “should not have seen,” Graver says in reference to the infamous Medellin cartel: “Medellin? Medellin refers to a time when one group controlled every aspect of the drug trade, providing a measure of order that we could control.”

This last line — “providing a measure of order that we could control” — neatly sums up the past two decades of U.S. domestic and foreign policy.

Like the 2010s, a decade that began with the high hopes of meaningful change in Washington, Sicario starts with a bang and ends with a disillusioned whimper. In between, there is terror, betrayal, death, and men chasing the illusion of control. This is the world in which Macer finds herself, wondering all the while what it means to be the “good guy."

Though critics and fans often cite Sicario’s final line as its greatest (“You will not survive here. You are not a wolf. This is the land of wolves.”), it is a different remark that asks the film’s most pertinent, and pressing, question.

“Fuck are we doing?” Macer cries as her American colleagues kill eight suspected cartel agents in broad daylight.

No one really knows.