Sicario: Day of the Soldado (2018)

Sicario: Day of the Soldado arrives as a sequel that has shed its predecessor's residual interest in moral inquiry and replaced it with a leaner, meaner appetite for geopolitical grimness. Taylor Sheridan's script sends Matt Graver and Alejandro Gillick into Mexico to start a war between cartels by way of a kidnapped teenager, and the film commits to that premise with a straight face and a low opinion of everyone involved. The border is a machine that grinds people. The camera regards it with the detached professionalism of a man checking his watch.

The cultural ledger is remarkably thin. Latino performers fill the frame because the story sits on the border, not because anyone set out to make a statement, and more than one critic argued the film trafficked in the very stereotypes it might have examined. The lone significant female character, a cartel kingpin's daughter, is granted pluck and then denied any authority over her own fate, which reviewers read as amoral machismo and which the film would likely accept as a compliment. There is no romantic subtext to speak of, no environmental conscience, no interest in bodies beyond their capacity to absorb gunfire. A private military contractor turns a profit on covert violence, and the film notices this the way a man notices weather.

Its remaining virtues are craft in service of a sour mood: strong performances, a tense ambush, a grenade thrown with purpose. The messaging, such as it is, lives in the framing. The film holds opinions about the border and the cartels and prefers to let them hum underneath the shootouts instead of announcing them from a pulpit. Grim, efficient, and entirely uninterested in being anyone's moral instruction.