Sicario: You Have Got to be Kidding

Sicario, staring the amazing Emily Blunt and gorgeous Benicio Del Toro (did you see what I did there?)

So you have this tough woman, who has made it in the world of tough men. The first scene has her leading a police kidnapping bust, but instead it turns out to be a horror scene of Mexican drug gang related torture. She is shot at and survives while all around her are going down like bowling pins.

This is one awesome fighting machine.

Next scene we get further evidence that she is able to mix it with the “big boys” when they choose her over her partner who has done a tour of military duty, to join a top secret taskforce into the heart of the drug world. She’s in because they promise her it will give her a shot at vengeance for all her dead buddies from scene 1.

Then the nightmare begins! A nightmare for women sitting in the audience that is.

So begins the long and careful stripping of any agency this tough woman has. She is told nothing. “Just sponge it up”. Her partner pops up every now and then and insists on knowing what they’re up to. She waves her hands helplessly. And yes… all he has to do is ask, and being a bloke, albeit a wussy one who has only done one tour of military duty, they give him the answers they don’t give her. Nice one.

It becomes clear that she is a pawn in a game she can’t possibly understand, being just a girl and all. She even goes “crying like a kid” to her normal boss about how her new friends are breaking the rules. She’s quickly slapped down and told to get back in the play pit.

She bumps around in the dark, discovering things she shouldn’t see. She does get an active moment in the plot.

Ah, wait, that was when the plot uses her sexuality for a major twist. She is so unappealing as a woman she hasn’t had sex for “don’t ask” how long, and she doesn’t even have a frilly bra. I mean can you be a real woman without one of those? So when a good guy turns up she’s all in and it’s hot and heavy pretty quickly. Only he’s a bad guy, and just as she is suffocating to death with his hands around her throat, one of her pals from the play pit turns up to save her and it becomes obvious that they’d used her as bait to catch this bad guy. Only no one had let her in on it.

There is even a nod to a simulated rape scene, where her partner is told to lie back and enjoy it as the boss guy hauls our heroine away to rough her up and hold her down against the rocks until she stops protesting and goes quiet.

And we twist and turn unrelentingly until the last scene where she is forced, tears running down her cheek, to sign a document that says that everything was done by the book, and there hadn’t been a cowboy’s picnic after all. A gun at her head, this is the final nail in the coffin of any agency she might have had. She goes against all her principles and her threat of a scene or two back that she will never let them get away with it. Powerless and defeated, she lets them get away with it.

There’s not much to love in this movie for a woman who wants to be the subject of her own life rather than the object of somebody else’s. So for who’s pleasure is this movie constructed? Does it give men pleasure to see even the toughest of women subjugated and rendered powerless?

My big take away? Well, there are two:

1) Don’t think just because you can fight like a man we’ll let you be as powerful as a man. We still run the show, don’t you know?

2) Don’t go to Juarez, Mexico! It ain’t a pretty place.

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