Sicario

It’s a Mexican slang name for hitman. I was just reflecting that the only good thing to ever come out of our brain-dead, idiotic, useless, totally counterproductive War on Drugs (and a mighty small “good thing” it is) is that when book and movie writers ran out of Bad Guys like Fucking Nazis and Muslim Terrorists there were always Mexican Drug Cartels to fill in for them. The trouble is, any honest story about the drug wars doesn’t have any Good Guys. Think about the CIA’s operation that transported heroin out of Laos and Cambodia right into the veins of American addicts. That happened, you can look it up. And if you don’t think things as bad as that, and worse, are still happening with our spook and law enforcement agencies, you’re kidding yourself.

There is a Good Guy in this story, an FBI agent played by Emily Blunt. She is bamboozled into joining a task force that hopes to bring down one of the top people in one of the cartels. She soon finds herself trapped into a para-military and highly illegal operation, basically an assassination squad. So what do you do? These people are operating so far off the grid that it is certain they will kill her if she tries to blow the whistle. And in the end, who the fuck cares if they take down one kingpin? There are ten others ready to slaughter hundreds of people—men, women, and children—to take his place. The ending of this movie is about as brutal as anything I’ve ever seen, and yet it can convey only the tiniest fraction of the horror that happens daily south of the border, and all because we have made drugs illegal. It is America’s great shame, and nobody seems eager to do anything about it. There’s too much money to be made. This movie is extremely well made, with two sequences of high tension action, but the main reason to see it is to confront the moral decisions the characters make. It’s definitely not for everyone, but if you can stand the outrage, it’s a must see.