Sicario

SICARIO                               B+      

USA  (121 mi)  2015  ‘Scope  d:  Denis Villeneuve             Official Facebook

In the manner of Gerardo Naranjo’s Miss Bala (2011), Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty (2012), and Amat Escalante’s Heli (2013), Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve has made a Hollywood action thriller that brings the audience directly into the Mexican drug wars, giving them a front row seat exposing the nefarious practices taking place by our own government in the name of stamping out criminal activities.  While the title of the film is Mexican slang for the word “hitman,” the film paints a dark picture into the skewed moral lines that exist in combatting drug wars, where it’s often hard to tell the difference between the good guys and the bad guys, as both are operating in the same toxic cesspool of greed, corruption, murder, and power, as all sides are vying to control the $19 to $29 billion dollars that the Mexican drug cartels receive annually from U.S. drug sales.  While this is essentially a high powered, adrenaline-laced film from start to finish, we are drawn into the action in a riveting opening, seen through the eyes of Kate Macy (Emily Blunt), an overly conscientious FBI agent specializing in kidnapping cases leading a SWAT team to an Arizona border town home where they believe people are being hidden.  In the process of discovering 40 dead bodies stored vertically in the walls wrapped in plastic body bogs, a planted explosive device wipes out part of the team.  After this harrowing experience, Kate is called into a meeting where a special task force of elite agents is considering their next move, where she is told the house is owned by a local cartel boss Manuel Diaz (Bernardo P. Saracino) before being asked to volunteer as an operative on special assignment headed by Matt Graver (Josh Brolin) in the Defense Department, even though she has no real drug enforcement experience.  Their goal is to track down the head of a notorious drug cartel, Fausto Alarcon (Julio Cesar Cedillo), kidnapping one of Diaz’s chief operatives named Guillermo (Edgar Arreola) in an attempt to flush Fausto out of hiding.  While purportedly flying to El Paso, Texas, their real destination is Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, where an entirely different set of rules operate, as this has been the site of a long and bloody battleground over contested gang turf.  Mexican drug cartels control 90% of the cocaine entering the United States, where the Ciudad Juárez cartel had control over prime drug trafficking routes, but they have been under attack from the more powerful Sinaloa Cartel, headed by the recently escaped most-wanted prisoner, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, whose estimated net worth is in the billions, infiltrating the police, government and the military, where they are the largest known mafia organization in the world.  Stepping into the middle of this dispute is like walking through the gates of Hell, as over 140,000 people have been killed in the Mexican drug wars since 2006, with nearly 30,000 people still missing.  Because it happens on the other side of the border, it may as well be invisible to most Americans, but life in Mexico can be a traumatizing experience. 

The director uses a blisteringly intense, cinéma vérité style to express just how brutally violent the world in Mexico has become, including the sight of hacked-off remains of dead bodies hanging from a bridge while Kate rides in a caravan of giant SUV’s and machine-gun implanted vans driving through the city streets of Juárez past astonished bystanders, where a firefight may erupt at any second, as they are being tailed by other suspicious vehicles.  Despite this military presence, they are able to surprise Guillermo, literally kidnapping him from his home, then making a mad dash to the border where traffic is backed up due to a car breakdown up ahead, leaving cars in a standstill.  In this tense atmosphere, despite the wall-to-wall presence of civilians, their team must identify would-be assassins in the vicinity and strike before being struck, turning into a bloodbath taking place in a sea of innocent bystanders.  Horrified by what she witnesses, they are quickly whisked away to safety carrying their prisoner in tow to the security of a nearby army facility.  Graver and his all-male team leave Kate out of the information trail, where part of the intentional thrust of the film is that it happens so fast and in such a confusing manner that it’s hard to follow just what’s taking place, where Kate’s mind is stunned by a flurry of improvisational fast action, where her confusion is translated to the audience.  It’s here that she meets Benicio del Toro as Alejandro, a native Colombian and former Mexican prosecutor whose presence is shrouded in mystery, though his physical hand shakes with the appearance of a man who has survived torture.  Appropriately, he is the man who interrogates Guillermo, bringing in a giant water jug, where in pure Hitchcockian fashion the camera focuses upon a drain on the floor, suggesting either waterboarding and/or an outlet for the stream of blood.  Torture is alive and well in the drug wars, where the film provides a searing realism that matches Erick Zonca’s JULIA (2008), especially the back alleys of seedy, gang-infested Mexican neighborhoods where danger lurks around every corner.  Into this swath of unending violence, another smaller story is being told, representing the average Mexican family, where a young Mexican kid is always waiting for his perpetually oversleeping Dad (he’s a cop that works nights) to take him to play soccer, where all he’s really asking for is a hint of normalcy.  This contrasts with the blurred reality of Kate, who is told by Alejandro that “Nothing will make sense to your American ears.  By the end, you will understand,” a clear stand-in for the American public that hasn’t a clue what’s going on, where part of the problem is seeing things exclusively through American eyes, which has a tendency to reveal only what they pick and choose while leaving out the rest.  This trip into Juárez is a surreal reminder of moral ambiguity, like the “heart of darkness” descent up river in Coppola’s APOCALYPSE NOW (1979), exposing America’s venture into Cambodia during the Vietnam era, a military excursion shrouded in secrecy taking place simultaneous to a President and Secretary of State repeatedly informing the American public and the world that Cambodia was strictly off limits. 

Kate is stunned by the expansion of American authority into Mexico, but receives word from her superiors that for this operation, the rules of engagement have expanded.  After learning the whereabouts of Diaz’s hideout from secret torture sessions, Graver’s team also rounds up Mexican migrants attempting to cross the border, checking for the presence of drug tunnels along the route, zeroing in on a specific location.  At the same time they freeze Diaz’s American bank accounts, where Kate thinks they have sufficient information to prosecute Diaz, but Graver isn’t interested, insisting it’s his boss they’re after.  By being left out of the specifics of each plan, where no one is what they appear to be, all carrying a hidden agenda, while Kate is simply going along for the ride, where the entire mission may have originally been intended to recruit her, but she’s the only one in the entire film that has any sense of a moral compass.  Everyone else is totally out of bounds, where they recognize her hesitation and how green she is immediately.  It’s not hard for her to realize she’s only in the operation because she’s working “within the law,” as a cover for their cowboy recklessness, somehow making it all legal.  While she has an opportunity to simply get out, an awkward moment where Alejandro actually has her back, literally saving her life, she feels compelled to find out where it all leads, as these guys are closer to the heads of the cartels than she’s ever been.  Using infra-red photography, a special ops night mission targets the American entrance of the tunnel, located in the middle of an endless desert expanse, where the look of the film recalls the mission to assassinate Osama bin Laden in Zero Dark Thirty, both accentuating the military aspect of the raid where these guys mean business, specializing in getting in and out while completing their mission as quickly as possible.  While gunfire is heard in all directions, she gets separated from the team, exiting from one of the many tunnels where she sees something she’s not supposed to see, as it appears Alejandro is about to shoot an unarmed Mexican cop named Silvio (Maximiliano Hernández, the father of the little kid) whose police car is filled to the gills with drugs and refers to Alejandro as “Medellín,” a hint as to his true connections.  The film belongs to del Toro by the end of the picture, where his sinister presence dominates the screen, crossing the line between both hero and villain, yet his intentions are lethal, reminiscent of Max von Sydow’s coolly precise assassin character in THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR (1975), a man who operates outside all moral laws.  Whether this is all a CIA operation or not, one would think the war on drugs has failed, as America remains the largest consumer of the illegal products, so it’s perfectly conceivable that the U.S. government has no conceivable plan to stop the flow of drugs into this country, as the business is simply too lucrative.  While it’s treading on murky waters, what’s clear is the war on drugs has brought the cartel wars into our own country, where it’s not about stopping the flow of drugs but instead trying to control and/or influence the powers running the business operation.  It’s a chilling ending, where a fatherless kid makes his way to the soccer game, where the everpresent sound of gunfire can be heard from the surrounding neighborhoods, an everyday fact of life that will remain with him always.  The cinematography by Roger Deakins is stellar, while the dark musical score by Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson adds a pulsating presence of gloom. 

Heli

HELI                            B         

Mexico  France  Germany  Netherlands  (105 mi)  2013  d:  Amat Escalante     Website    Trailer

Open your eyes so you don’t miss the show.      —narco gang torturer and murderer

A brutally disturbing look at the effect of the narco drug trafficking war in Mexico, a follow up to Gerardo Naranjo’s acclaimed Miss Bala (2011), both of which show how innocent people are pulled into the deadly affairs of Mexican drug cartels, which have killed as many as 60,000 people since the military declared a Mexican drug war in 2006, while another 20,000 are still unaccounted for, where cartels control 90% of the cocaine entering the United States, which amounts to a $30 billion dollar industry.  Both Mexican and the U.S. media have made claims that the Sinaloa Cartel, considered the biggest criminal organization in the world, and the leading drug trafficker, has infiltrated the Mexican federal government and military, and colluded with it to destroy and take over other cartels.  Much like the Russian film The Major (Mayor) (2013), both show the devastating effects of police corruption, where there’s reason to believe, according to Los Señores del Narco (Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers), a recent book by Anabel Hernández and Roberto Saviano, the author of Gomorrah, that Mexico’s war on drugs is a big lie, as they don’t believe the government is fighting the cartels, linking the violence of the cartels to the leadership of the Mexican state, which in the eyes of the public are indistinguishable.  According to Saviano’s forward to the book, “Narcoland shows how contemporary capitalism is in no position to renounce the mafia.  Because it is not the mafia that has transformed itself into a modern capitalist enterprise, it is capitalism that has transformed itself into a mafia.  The rules of drug trafficking that Anabel Hernández describes are also the rules of capitalism.”  Initially driven by personal outrage, the father of Ms. Hernández was kidnapped in 2000, where the Mexico City police would only investigate if they were paid, which the family refused to do, where her father was subsequently found murdered.  When Ms. Hernández began writing about the violence of the drug cartels, she has received boxes of dead animals left at her doorstep, where Mexico is the fourth most deadly country for reporters, topped only by Syria, Somalia, and Pakistan. 

    

Amat Escalante worked as an assistant director to Carlos Reygadas in BATTLE OF HEAVEN (2005), becoming close friends afterwards, where Reygadas is listed as a producer of several Escalante films, including this one which won the Best Director prize at Cannes, following Reygadas who won the exact same award the year before with 2012 Top Ten List #2 Post Tenebras Lux (2012).  A picture of grim hopelessness, the film is set in the Guanajuato region of central Mexico, one of the more lawless, crime-ridden regions, seen as an arid desert of unending emptiness, where Escalante captures the squalidness of Mexico’s drug war in the opening scene, an extended sequence that shows two bound and gagged men laying face down in the back of a pickup truck, with a mud-covered boot stepping on a man’s bloodied face with tape covering his mouth.  They stop at a bridge with a pedestrian crossing over the highway, quickly hauling a man’s body up the stairs where he is strung up and left for dead, hung by his neck with his hands tied behind his back in a public execution, a picture of mafia retribution, reminiscent of Mussolini and other Fascists executed at the end of the war, a humiliating act of revenge meant to discourage other Fascists from continuing the fight.  The film then backtracks to events leading up to the execution, where Heli (Armando Espitia) is a young factory worker at a nearby auto plant living with his father, both working different shifts, also his 12-year old sister Estela (Andrea Vergara), his wife Sabina (Linda González) and their baby.  A portrait of bleak lives, trouble starts when Estela develops a crush on the first boy she meets, the much older Beto (Juan Eduardo Palacios), a 17-year old special forces cadet, seen going through the grueling paces of intensive training, stealing two packets of cocaine intended for burning, thinking perhaps he could buy Estela’s hand in marriage or elope with the money earned by selling the confiscated drugs.  When Heli finds the packets hidden on the roof inside a water tank, he tries to do the right thing and dumps the drugs in an unused well. 

Government special forces barge in on them, breaking the door down and shooting his father, kidnapping both Heli and Estela, with a brutalized Beto already in the back of the van, where in short order it appears they are handed over to a narco gang, while Estela remains in the hands of corrupt government forces that likely sell her into prostitution, as she simply disappears.  Heli and Beto are sadistically tortured in front of younger kids who are more interested in playing video games.  Each is given a chance to take a whack at them, as Beto is beaten into losing consciousness, only to be revived for even worse, where the savage cruelty is shown with an alarmingly dispassionate casualness, as if the perpetrators are already numbed to their own nihilism.  This leads back to the opening scene at the bridge, where Heli stumbles home in a kind of dazed confusion afterwards, where the film does explore the psychic cost of violence in great detail.  The pain of his homecoming is further aggravated by a pair of unsympathetic cops who’d rather grill him with endless questions than offer him treatment for his medical injuries.  The cinematography by Lorenzo Hagerman is reminiscent of early Kiarostami, where a lone car dots the desolate landscape with a painterly beauty, or Sabina returns home with groceries in hand only to see a stream of blood on the floor and her family missing, collapsing in the doorway, where the camera tenderly pulls back, as if offering her space for her grief.  This is quite a contrast to the matter-of-fact cruelty that is part of the everyday horrors of the region, where even the investigating police are useless, requesting sexual favors from Heli in return for cooperation in finding his sister, who eventually wanders home on her own accord, pregnant and severely traumatized.  The portrait is one of a system thoroughly broken at the highest levels, where corruption is so entrenched systematically that it reaches down to the lowest levels of society, leaving its citizens thoroughly disgusted by the extensive reach of the violence, leaving them demoralized by such dim prospects of a better future, where day in and day out, all that’s left is a collective, uncontainable trauma. 

2011 Top Ten Films of the Year #9 Miss Bala

MISS BALA                     A-

Mexico  (113 mi)  2011  ‘Scope  d:  Gerardo Naranjo

While this is a case of the truth is stranger than fiction, the director along with fellow writer Mauricio Katz have fashioned a fictionalized account of real events that leap out of the headlines, Miss Sinaloa and the Seven Narcos, ran the headline in The Mexican-Daily El Universal, where beauty queen Laura Zuñiga, Miss Sinaloa 2008, was arrested along with seven suspected narco drug traffickers in a truck filled with guns and ammunition, including $53,000 in cash, two AR-15 rifles, three handguns, 633 cartridges of different calibers, and 16 cellphones, on December 23, 2008 in Zapopan, Mexico.  According to the film, 50,000 people have lost their lives in the Mexican Drug Wars just in the last 6 years where the profiteers are protecting a $30 billion dollar industry within Mexico alone, which of course, also exports to the consumer hungry United States.  What makes this even more interesting is the connection to American (DEA) Drug Enforcement Agents, where recently the U.S. Attorney General has come under fire for his lack of knowledge about guns from the DEA gone missing in Mexico in an operation gone bad, where it turns out the U.S. is basically arming the narco traffickers.  But this film foregoes the politics and turns this into an atmospheric mood piece on abject fear and hopelessness, creating a harrowing and visceral experience, a seat-of-your-pants thriller reminiscent of the opening episode from AMORES PERROS (2000), easily the best thing Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu has ever done, with both uniquely expressing a raw, in-your-face, hyperkinetic energy that literally jumps off the screen.  This film creates a similar pulse rate, but only in certain stages, as otherwise the gangsters lay low for awhile and rest easy for a little R & R with the co-opted beauty queen until they decide to move again.  Much of this has the feel of a para-military operation, complete with reconnaissance teams that always report the whereabouts of the cops, information from men who have infiltrated inside the records of the army and police, using one-time only cell phones to communicate orders to the commanders in the field, which are then cleaned to prevent tracing, while armies of trucks and black SUV’s with tinted windows swerve in and out of traffic in precise increments based on their knowledge of the various positions of the police.  Make no mistake, these are military maneuvers. 

While this may sound surprising to most Americans who still haven’t a clue what’s happening in the gang wars taking place in ghettos across America, this activity in Mexico is not confined to specific neighborhoods, but can play out on the city streets anywhere, where the presence of these gigantic SUV’s is an everyday reality for most citizens, where all they can hope is that they’re not targeting civilians.  Like any other war, this one goes after the Who’s Who in both the police and drug trafficker operations, each searching for the other, and when they meet a fierce firefight develops instantaneously, where chaos reigns and bullets fly in all directions.  The collateral damage extends to innocent civilians who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.  This film doesn’t suppose what happens when the innocent civilian is a Mexican beauty queen, but uses her actual experience of what really happened when she got sucked into narco operations purely by chance, where she proved useful to them as she was scared shitless, afraid for the lives of her family, so would do as instructed over a brief period of time which included several operations.  In real life, she was released following her arrest after the subsequent investigation proved she had no involvement with the narco drug industry, but was only a pawn in their game, suggesting it could just as easily be anybody, and often is.  This one just happened to be especially pretty, Stephanie Sigman as Laura Guerrero, a beauty queen contestant that attracted the eye of the drug kingpin, Lino (Noe Hernandez), a shadowy head of the Estrella drug cartel who sees her huddling in the corner during the middle of a raid on a nightclub targeting DEA agents, allowing her to live in order to make use of her in the future.  The film wastes no time getting right into the thick of the action.

This plays out like a Mexican version of a Michael Mann action thriller, shot in ‘Scope using long takes from the constantly probing camera by Hungarian cinematographer Mátyás Erdély, often altering the focus in the same shot, making excellent use of locations and off-screen sound, featuring riveting performances from characters forced to act on impulse when events continually spiral out of control, where the gangsters thrive on this kind of heart racing action, driving trophy Porsches through the streets of Tijuana, but not a teenage girl who is being used for target practice for the first time in her life, where she spends most of the movie close to peeing in her pants from the intense fear, where Lino is continually toying with her, always getting what he wants and then throwing her away until she’s summoned again from out of the blue, a repeating cycle that seemingly can’t be broken.  The overriding theme here is fear and how it plays havoc with ordinary people who are caught up in this phenomenon of gunfights taking place on the city streets in broad daylight, where one of the best edited transitions seen all year finds Laura pinned down in one of the fiercest gunfights you could imagine, using a slow tracking shot where bodies are dropping and bullets are flying, where the sound is deafening, like what it must have been for the Marines trapped in Mogadishu, where she is then whisked away from that reality into a continuing pan through the back wings of a beauty pageant where she is quickly dressed for a runway appearance, and with tears streaming down her face she’s continually reminded to smile.  This kind of mood shift is insane, as you have no time to process the fear, as her life has turned into a human pin cushion of getting stuck repeatedly with having to perform some of the most dangerous drug operations, where she is the center of the storm not knowing which way to turn for safety, as the bullets are flying from every direction, where Laura has to rely on the whims of a cold blooded killer for protection.  While the film is seen exclusively through the terrified eyes of one woman, the larger issues of Mexico’s inability to protect ordinary citizens from being caught in the crossfire of the Drug Wars remain. 

Miss Bala

Laura Zuñiga mug shot, Miss Sinaloa 2008

Laura Zuñiga, Miss Sinaloa 2008

MISS BALA                            A-

Mexico  (113 mi)  2011  ‘Scope  d:  Gerardo Naranjo

While this is a case of the truth is stranger than fiction, the director along with fellow writer Mauricio Katz have fashioned a fictionalized account of real events that leap out of the headlines, Miss Sinaloa and the Seven Narcos, ran the headline in The Mexican-Daily El Universal, where beauty queen Laura Zuñiga, Miss Sinaloa 2008, was arrested along with seven suspected narco drug traffickers in a truck filled with guns and ammunition, including $53,000 in cash, two AR-15 rifles, three handguns, 633 cartridges of different calibers, and 16 cellphones, on December 23, 2008 in Zapopan, Mexico.  According to the film, 50,000 people have lost their lives in the Mexican Drug Wars just in the last 6 years where the profiteers are protecting a $30 billion dollar industry within Mexico alone, which of course, also exports to the consumer hungry United States.  What makes this even more interesting is the connection to American (DEA) Drug Enforcement Agents, where recently the U.S. Attorney General has come under fire for his lack of knowledge about guns from the DEA gone missing in Mexico in an operation gone bad, where it turns out the U.S. is basically arming the narco traffickers.  But this film foregoes the politics and turns this into an atmospheric mood piece on abject fear and hopelessness, creating a harrowing and visceral experience, a seat-of-your-pants thriller reminiscent of the opening episode from AMORES PERROS (2000), easily the best thing Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu has ever done, with both uniquely expressing a raw, in-your-face, hyperkinetic energy that literally jumps off the screen.  This film creates a similar pulse rate, but only in certain stages, as otherwise the gangsters lay low for awhile and rest easy for a little R & R with the co-opted beauty queen until they decide to move again.  Much of this has the feel of a para-military operation, complete with reconnaissance teams that always report the whereabouts of the cops, information from men who have infiltrated inside the records of the army and police, using one-time only cell phones to communicate orders to the commanders in the field, which are then cleaned to prevent tracing, while armies of trucks and black SUV’s with tinted windows swerve in and out of traffic in precise increments based on their knowledge of the various positions of the police.  Make no mistake, these are military maneuvers. 

While this may sound surprising to most Americans who still haven’t a clue what’s happening in the gang wars taking place in ghettos across America, this activity in Mexico is not confined to specific neighborhoods, but can play out on the city streets anywhere, where the presence of these gigantic SUV’s is an everyday reality for most citizens, where all they can hope is that they’re not targeting civilians.  Like any other war, this one goes after the Who’s Who in both the police and drug trafficker operations, each searching for the other, and when they meet a fierce firefight develops instantaneously, where chaos reigns and bullets fly in all directions.  The collateral damage extends to innocent civilians who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.  This film doesn’t suppose what happens when the innocent civilian is a Mexican beauty queen, but uses her actual experience of what really happened when she got sucked into narco operations purely by chance, where she proved useful to them as she was scared shitless, afraid for the lives of her family, so would do as instructed over a brief period of time which included several operations.  In real life, she was released following her arrest after the subsequent investigation proved she had no involvement with the narco drug industry, but was only a pawn in their game, suggesting it could just as easily be anybody, and often is.  This one just happened to be especially pretty, Stephanie Sigman as Laura Guerrero, a beauty queen contestant that attracted the eye of the drug kingpin, Lino (Noe Hernandez), a shadowy head of the Estrella drug cartel who sees her huddling in the corner during the middle of a raid on a nightclub targeting DEA agents, allowing her to live in order to make use of her in the future.  The film wastes no time getting right into the thick of the action.

This plays out like a Mexican version of a Michael Mann action thriller, shot in ‘Scope using long takes from the constantly probing camera by Hungarian cinematographer Mátyás Erdély, often altering the focus in the same shot, making excellent use of locations and off-screen sound, featuring riveting performances from characters forced to act on impulse when events continually spiral out of control, where the gangsters thrive on this kind of heart racing action, driving trophy Porsches through the streets of Tijuana, but not a teenage girl who is being used for target practice for the first time in her life, where she spends most of the movie close to peeing in her pants from the intense fear, where Lino is continually toying with her, always getting what he wants and then throwing her away until she’s summoned again from out of the blue, a repeating cycle that seemingly can’t be broken.  The overriding theme here is fear and how it plays havoc with ordinary people who are caught up in this phenomenon of gunfights taking place on the city streets in broad daylight, where one of the best edited transitions seen all year finds Laura pinned down in one of the fiercest gunfights you could imagine, using a slow tracking shot where bodies are dropping and bullets are flying, where the sound is deafening, like what it must have been for the Marines trapped in Mogadishu, where she is then whisked away from that reality into a continuing pan through the back wings of a beauty pageant where she is quickly dressed for a runway appearance, and with tears streaming down her face she’s continually reminded to smile.  This kind of mood shift is insane, as you have no time to process the fear, as her life has turned into a human pin cushion of getting stuck repeatedly with having to perform some of the most dangerous drug operations, where she is the center of the storm not knowing which way to turn for safety, as the bullets are flying from every direction, where Laura has to rely on the whims of a cold blooded killer for protection.  While the film is seen exclusively through the terrified eyes of one woman, the larger issues of Mexico’s inability to protect ordinary citizens from being caught in the crossfire of the Drug Wars remain.