Cannes Report: Emily Blunt is Criminally Good in the Tense, Uneven Drug War Drama ‘Sicario’

‘Sicario’ (Lionsgate)

When you look closely at her filmography, you notice that Emily Blunt has an almost unbelievable range. She’s been great in an admirably wide variety of projects, including mainstream comedies (The Devil Wears Prada), indie dramas (My Summer of Love, Your Sister’s Sister), musicals (Into the Woods), and more. And in recent years, she’s only gotten tougher on-screen: The 32-year-old actress might not have been anyone’s idea of a futuristic boo-yah warrior, but she pulled that off in last summer’s terrific (and terrifically underrated) action movie Edge of Tomorrow.

Now, she’s taking on another, more realistic kind of warrior role in director Denis Villeneuve’s dark and terrifyingly tense drug-war drama Sicario, which made its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival today. At its best, Sicario — the title, we’re told, is Mexican slang for “hit man” — recalls The Silence of the Lambs or Training Day, and may prove to be just as divisive as those dark-hearted modern classics: There were definitely a few walkouts at Tuesday’s Sicario premire, perhaps because of the movie’s stark violence, and the applause from the crowd at the end was muted. But the post-screening reviews have been guardedly positive, particularly for Blunt, a gratifying result considering Villeneuve told the Cannes press conference that screenwriter Taylor Sheridan had at one point been pressured to make her character a man.

Blunt plays Kate Macer, an experienced FBI agent whom we meet in the middle of a raid on a tract house in Arizona in a masterfully shot opening sequence. (The stark, stunning cinematography comes courtesy of Roger Deakins, the Coen brothers mainstay who also worked on Villeneuve’s Prisoners.) Macer’s team is looking for hostages, but what they find instead is a trap door rigged to explode, and dozens of mutilated bodies behind the drywall. It’s a big enough horror show to justify bringing in a vaguely powerful inter-agency task force, one that’s led by Matt Graver (Josh Brolin), a smug, surfer-casual spook who won’t say exactly what agency he works for, but has the easy certainty that he won’t be constrained by laws or budgets. His associate is the even more shadowy Alejandro (Benecio del Toro), a stone-cold killer who once had a soul, the remnants of which only make him seem more dangerous now.

Macer is recruited as an FBI liaison and thrown into the black-ops deep end with little explanation of what’s going on. Blunt is so good here — tough, smart, and competent, but vulnerable too, and as much in the dark as the audience. She’s taken along on a mysterious, heavy-firepower operation across the border in Juarez. It’s a fantastic set-piece that plays as a taut, low-speed car chase, with a line of government-issue SUVs making their way through a hellish urban war zone. Gradually, Macer and her partner Reggie (Daniel Kaluuya) learn the operation’s aim is to track down and kill the Mexican cartel boss — and that for Graver and Alejandro, torture, corruption, and extralegal military raids are just tools of the trade.

The last third of Sicario is a disappointment: There’s a barely-there parallel story line involving a corrupt Mexican cop (Maximiliano Hernández) that never pays off, and the final confrontation between Alejandro and the cartel boss falls into some unfortunate clichés. (No spoilers, but someone utters a variation of “it wasn’t personal.”) Worst is the lack of movement for Blunt’s character. There’s no Clarice Starling-style finale for her; Macer starts the movie out of her depth and pretty much ends it there too. Perhaps the point is that no one should want to sound those depths. But it’s still a let-down that for as impressive a performance as Blunt builds, she isn’t given a chance to the rise to one final occasion.