1. If the original Sicario had not existed, I bet we’d all give Sicario: The Day of the Soldado a lot more slack. The original Denis Villeneuve film wasn’t perfect, but it had that director’s sense of scope and moral ambiguity, and it knew how to deliver the goods in the moment even if it didn’t ultimately add up to all that much. This one, directed by Italian television director Stefano Sollima and written by Hell or High Water’s Taylor Sheridan (who also wrote the first film), doesn’t have that film’s ambition, but it doesn’t want it: It wants to be a sleek, raw, muscular drug thriller in which big burly dudes growl at each other in the midst of an escalating drug war in which everyone is implicated and everyone is guilty. It doesn’t demand to be taken for much more than that, and if you’re able to accept it as that—as tough dudes posturing and being badass—you’ll find plenty to wallow around in here. But that Sicario name lingers, like an ancestor whose family name you need but don’t desire to live up to. It’s better the less you think about the first movie at all.
2. Three characters return from the original, though you might only recognize one of them. Jeffrey Donovan (whom I don’t remember from the first film at all) is back as the assistant to hard-bitten federal agent Matt Graver (Josh Brolin, who is even more bulked up from the first film and is becoming increasingly inextricable from Thanos). This time, after an opening sequence that ties the drug trade and border patrol issues from the first film—and, you know, real life—to an act of terrorism (that’s so vividly and frighteningly portrayed that it’s a little annoying how little it matters to the film as a whole), the duo gets a green light from the feds to declare the Mexican drug cartels terrorist organizations. That allows them to “get dirty,” as Graver puts it, so they put together a plan to stir up the cartels into fighting with each other so that they can put the full force of the American military into taking them down. Though the full force of the military in the context of this movie means bringing back Benicio Del Toro’s Alejandro from the first film, the mournful, relentless assassin who seems to specialize in shooting a gun incredibly fast.
3. Their plan is to kidnap the daughter (Isabela Moner) of the main cartel head, and it will not give you much more faith in the full force of the American military than you already have to learn that the plan goes to shit relatively quickly. The movie then becomes a balance of these too men, Graver and Alejandro, both ruthless murderers but each doing it for a cause that they see as just, or at least can convince themselves remains so. Unfortunately, Alejandro’s cause becomes a familiar one, one you’ve seen in countless action movies: A lost soul attempting to find his salvation by protecting a young girl. Alejandro might be an efficient killer, but we just saw this in Logan and dozens of other movies. This film doesn’t have much new to add to the formula.