Edge city

Sicario opens with a botched hostage raid by the FBI. Agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) and her partner Reggie (Daniel Kaluuya) bust through the walls of a Phoenix, Arizona home to recover hostages, but instead uncover 42 bodies decomposing behind the walls, bloodied plastic bags over their heads. Obviously a makeshift dumping ground for the Mexican drug cartels.

This leads to action from above, as smirking Department of Defense “consultant” Matt Graver (Josh Brolin) arrives at FBI headquarters to recruit Agent Macer. Her tactical experience could be helpful in Graver’s mission — if only she could figure out what that mission actually is. Her first sign of trouble is Graver’s footwear: the dude is wearing flip-flops to the FBI meeting.

Sicario is a movie that Donald Trump would love — at first. It depicts the border between Mexico and the United States as a seething crime zone that is quickly inching its way toward American soil. It shows Mexicans as criminals and illegal immigrants, carrying drugs and scoffing at US laws. The obvious “bad guys.”

But Denis Villenueve’s crime drama is better than that: it doesn’t stop with just indicting the corrupt cops and officials of Juarez and Mexico; it implicates corrupt CIA and government collaboration in the so-called “War on Drugs.”

Cuidad Juarez, at the border between Mexico and Texas, has a reputation as the deadliest city in the world. Controlled by drug cartels, it boasts thousands of murders per year (or at least it did in years past; officials there now say things have cooled down a bit). It was routine to hear about media, cops, mayors being held hostage or dismembered by drug cartels, or funerals shot up by machine guns to silence potential whistleblowers and the like. It was kind of the grisly inspiration for Breaking Bad’s south-of-the-border drug cartels as well as Roberto Bolaño’s novel, 2666.

Brolin’s perpetually smug, wolfishly grinning Graver is one keynote in this bloody, unsettling tale. The other is the always-reliable Benicio Del Toro as Alejandro Gillick: Graver’s hulking, Spanish-speaking partner. The two lead Macer into the inferno of Juarez, where dismembered cadavers hang from bridges as a warning to those who would dare to talk. Their initial mission is to recover one indicted suspect — a certain Guillermo — and bring him back to US soil. This is accomplished by a caravan of identical black Ford minivans with Mexican state police cruisers and choppers flanking them. Extracting the suspect is easy; getting back across the US border is the tricky part. Stuck in the immigration lane with their suspect’s head covered by a black bag, Macer’s entourage is about to get lit up by two carloads of gun-toting Mexicans. Naturally, there’s a very bloody Mexican standoff. And naturally, Macer ends up wondering how deep the doo-doo is that she’s volunteered to walk into.

Blunt here is very good as the chain-smoking Macer, allowing herself to look haggard, perpetually distressed, worrying her hair. Her “lone female” role calls to mind Jodie Foster as Agent Starling in The Silence of the Lambs, but Macer is more goggle-eyed by what surrounds her. After all, there is no clear “mission,” as there was in Silence of the Lambs; Graver and Alejandro keep Macer in the dark, even as they lead her by the nose. “I have to know what this is about,” she tells her partner, and it reminds you of all those fairy tales about Pandora’s Box and Bluebeard’s curious wives. You don’t want to know, Macer.

Does Sicario exaggerate the drug crisis in Juarez, and the US response to it? Surely it must. Does the CIA secretly fund assassinations of drug cartel sideliners in order to ensure “order” at the top of drug-running operations? Perhaps to get a cut at the same time? It’s an old allegation, going back to Vietnam War days, Southeast Asia’s opium-running Golden Triangle. We don’t know. The recent Johnny Depp crime thriller Black Mass depicted a similar situation: the FBI recruiting Boston mobster Whitey Bulger as an informant, in order to help shut down competing Italian and Hispanic mobs. Collusion is everywhere, after all — even at NAIA, where a suspicious number of random passengers apparently have a predilection for carrying loose bullets.

What Sicario brings back is a taut, gritty kind of crime thriller that we thought was gone since Soderbergh’s Traffic. Spare at times in terms of dialogue and explication, it is also unsparing in its grim point of view. The action scenes are top-notch, gripping and eerie (especially a night-vision scene in a Juarez border tunnel that will remind you of a video game).

Brolin is good in his usual gum-chewing, aw-shucks manner, but it’s the interplay between Blunt and Del Toro that is well worth watching. Every flicker of fear on Blunt’s face, every raised eyebrow of menace by Del Toro, adds to the pulse-racing effect.

Like Traffic, Sicario offers no solutions to the drug problem. A final scene involving kids playing soccer echoes the baseball scene at the end of Traffic (which also won Del Toro an Oscar); but it’s the sound of automatic weapon fire in the distance that lingers.

Bleak and mesmerizing as it is, all we really learn from Sicario is that the world is divided between wolves and those who are not wolves. And that one side is safer to be on than the other.