SICARIO: DAY OF THE SOLDADO (US - 2018) Directed by Stefano Sollima. Written by Taylor Sheridan. Cast: Benicio Del Toro, Josh Brolin, Catherine Keener, Isabela Moner, Jeffrey Donovan, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Matthew Modine, Shea Whigham, Elijah Rodriguez, Bruno Bichir, Graham Beckel, Raoul Trujillo, David Castaneda, Faysal Ahmed. (R, 122 mins) The tough and uncompromising SICARIO opened to much acclaim in the fall of 2015, but it didn't end on a note that left anyone demanding a sequel. SICARIO director Denis Villeneuve and star Emily Blunt are out, but co-stars Benicio Del Toro, Josh Brolin, and Jeffrey Donovan are back, along with writer Taylor Sheridan (HELL OR HIGH WATER, WIND RIVER, and, since he continues to pretend it doesn't exist, VILE). Italian director Stefano Sollima (the son of legendary Eurocult director Sergio Sollima, best known for THE BIG GUNDOWN and VIOLENT CITY) makes his US debut and does a solid job of adhering to the style set by Villeneuve, with a particular affinity for those overhead shots of fast-moving military caravans that were so memorable the first time around. Though Del Toro's contracted agent Alejandro is the titular sicario, or assassin, it was Blunt's rookie FBI agent who served as the core of the story and the connection to the audience as she barreled headlong into a situation far more violent and dangerous than she ever anticipated. The shift in focus to Del Toro isn't a surprise considering it began about 3/4 of the way through SICARIO, when Blunt's agent was relegated to the sideline while Villeneuve and Sheridan concentrated on Alejandro's quest for revenge against a cartel underboss who killed his family.
It takes a little while for Alejandro to show up in SICARIO: DAY OF THE SOLDADO (which was titled SICARIO 2: SOLDADO when the first trailer appeared), as the globetrotting intro jumps from migrants being stopped at the US/Mexico border to an ISIS suicide bombing in a Kansas City supermarket to CIA agent Matt Graver (Brolin) in Djibouti before being sent to Somalia to interrogate a pirate and terror suspect who knows the connection between the seemingly unrelated incidents. It turns out that the Mexican cartels have found a lucrative side gig in smuggling people over the US border, including Islamic terrorists. To combat this unforeseen front in the war on terror, the Secretary of Defense (Matthew Modine) and CIA chief Cynthia Foards (Catherine Keener) assign Graver to a top-secret mission to start a war between the cartels and hope they all wipe each other out, of course with the stipulation that the government will deny any knowledge and Graver is on his own if the truth leaks out. Assembling his usual crew, including bespectacled right-hand man Steve Forsing (Donovan) and the elusive Alejandro, with the caveat "No rules this time" (were there rules last time?), Graver oversees the assassination of the top lawyer of a major cartel boss and orchestrates the abduction of 16-year-old Isabela Reyes (Isabala Moner), the daughter of Carlos Reyes, another top cartel honcho. This starts the war they intended as Graver and Alejandro stash the girl at a safe house in Texas, but when they try to get her back into Mexico, the entire plan goes to shit. Graver and the crew end up back in the States while Alejandro and Isabela are left on their own in Mexico, as the President, the Secretary of Defense, and Foards scramble to explain why CIA and US military were engaged in a firefight in Mexico, ordering Graver to clean up the mess, including any trace of Alejandro.
SICARIO worked fine on its own, and SOLDADO is sufficiently entertaining if completely superfluous. Brolin is fun as Graver, who often seems like what might happen if The Dude was ever in the CIA. But Del Toro is the primary focus this time, and the film wants to further humanize Alejandro, with Isabela essentially serving as the surrogate daughter to replace the one he lost under the orders of her own father. Isabella's father, seemingly an important figure, is never seen, and there's a lot of time devoted to a tenuously-connected subplot involving Miguel (Elijah Rodriguez), a Mexican-American teenager in McAllen, TX just over the border. Impressionable Miguel has a passport and gets roped by his older cousin into working as a mule for cartel flunky Gallo (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo). Miguel and Alejandro have a passing encounter in a mall parking lot that will come into play much later, but when it does, it still feels forced and hackneyed. It's indicative of the indecisive nature of Sheridan's script. The political implications of the story muddled enough as it is (how exactly does the Secretary of Defense think it will emerge from this half-baked plan unscathed?), but between the Alejandro/Graver/Isabela and the Miguel storylines, SOLDADO feels like two ideas Sheridan couldn't flesh out, so he tried to cram them into one. Indeed, by the time we get to the abrupt and unsatisfying conclusion, which leaves several threads dangling and the door wide open for a third installment, the realization sets in that SOLDADO plays like the two-hour premiere of a SICARIO TV series that's cleverly disguised as a feature film. A hypothetical SICARIO: THE SERIES on Netflix sounds like a better idea than the strange determination to turn the Alejandro story into a big-screen franchise.
GET OUT (US - 2017) Written and directed by Jordan Peele. Cast: Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams, Catherine Keener, Bradley Whitford, Caleb Landry Jones, Stephen Root, Lakeith Stanfield, Marcus Henderson, Betty Gabriel, Lil Rel Howery, Richard Herd, Erika Alexander, Trey Burvant. (R, 104 mins) GET OUT is getting the best reviews of any 2017 release thus far, and when a genre film shows any degree of insight and razor-sharp social commentary, it's easy to overrate it. But GET OUT is one of the best and smartest fright flicks to come along in a while--caustic, uncomfortable, and refusing to pull punches, but remembering to be entertaining and witty at the same time. It deftly balances the majority of its time being genuinely unnerving but also with more than its share of funny moments, some engineered to make you laugh out loud and others designed to make you uneasy. The directing debut of KEY AND PEELE's Jordan Peele, who also scripted, GET OUT stars Daniel Kaluuya (SICARIO and the "Fifteen Million Merits" episode of BLACK MIRROR) as Chris Washington, a 26-year-old photographer who's about to go away for the weekend to meet the parents of Rose Armitage (GIRLS' Allison Willliams), his girlfriend of four months. He's a bit nervous--he's black, she's white, and she hasn't told them--but she assures him that they won't have a problem with him. The ride there includes a collision with a deer and an unpleasant run-in with a local cop (Chris is quick to comply, realizing it doesn't take much for a situation to escalate from zero to Trayvon Martin), but once at the estate of the wealthy Armitages, things are pleasant if awkward. Rose's mom Missy (Catherine Keener) is a psychiatrist who wants to hypnotize Chris to help him quit smoking, and her neurologist dad Dean (Bradley Whitford) means well but tries too hard to ingratiate himself, with everything from repeatedly calling Chris "My man," to numerous mentions that he "would've voted for Obama a third time," and asking how long Chris and Rose's "thaaang" has been going on.
Chris has a strange dinner conversation with Rose's brother Jeremy (Caleb Landry Jones) where Jeremy tells him he has the physique to be a monster MMA fighter. He's also taken aback by the presence of two oddly-behaving black employees--groundskeeper Walter (Marcus Henderson) and housekeeper Georgina (Betty Gabriel)--who aren't very good at conversation and have dead, vacant stares in their eyes. Dean says he hired them to help out when his parents were ailing and after they died, he didn't have the heart to let them go ("I know how it looks," Dean says). The Armitages hold a party for all of their wealthy and almost across-the-board elderly friends, all of whom try too hard to appeal to Chris, whether it's feeling his biceps, mentioning how much they like Tiger Woods, or making winking assumptions about how well-endowed he must be. Chris seems to be used to well-intentioned whites trying too hard but something isn't sitting well with him. He believes Missy hypnotized him without his knowledge and he recognizes Logan (Lakeith Stanfield), the young black companion of a 30-years-older white woman, as Andre, an old acquaintance of a friend of a friend who went missing six months ago. Chris takes a pic of him to send to his dog-sitting buddy Rod (a scene-stealing Lil Rel Howell) but he forgets to turn off the flash and it causes a brief seizure where Logan, who dresses like an old man and has no idea how to fist-bump, snaps out of his stupor and seems to briefly take on another personality until he's attended to by Missy. Rod theorizes that "rich white people are brainwashing brothers into becoming sex slaves," and while Chris laughs it off, his paranoia grows more intense by the minute and he can't ignore his gut feeling that something is very wrong here.
Of course, something is wrong but GET OUT doesn't quite go in the direction the trailers and your initial assumptions might indicate. It invokes a few classics from the 1970s, from THE WICKER MAN to MESSIAH OF EVIL and one in particular that's too much of a spoiler to mention. Despite its modern themes, it actually feels like a 1970s movie in both its working in of social issues and the emphasis on building suspense instead of focusing on gore and cheap jump scares (though a couple of jump scares here work quite well). In the end, GET OUT ends up being more about class division than racial injustice, a scathing rebuke not just of white privilege but also the entitlement of the wealthy for whom money--and people--are no object. No one is immune from criticism--even Chris is shown time and again to be a pushover and someone who doesn't want to rock the boat. Peele's script piles on the unease and the dread until it's almost suffocating, broken up by Rod's comic relief that's actually a welcome breather from the choking tension (Rod's Jeffrey Dahmer rant is one for the ages). Performances are pitch perfect across the board, whether it's Whitford's vaguely passive-aggressive glad-handing as Dean or Gabriel's often heartbreaking turn as Georgina, whose constant smile always seems a little too forced, masking a sadness that isn't lost on Chris. Alternately frightening, funny, and thought-provoking, with the kind of crowd-pleasing finale that horror movies used to know how to deliver, GET OUT isn't a quite an instant classic, but it's one of the stronger genre offerings of late, and one that establishes Peele, already a respected comedian and satirist, as a serious filmmaker to watch.
