Posts Tagged ‘Benicio Del Toro’

SICARIO: 4 STARS. “tension, moral ambiguity and no happy endings.”

Fresh from a festival run—TIFF and the Cannes Film Festival where it competed for the Palme d’Or—comes Emily Blunt, Benicio del Toro and Josh Brolin in a drama about an idealistic FBI agent working with an elite task force to stem the flow of drugs between Mexico and the US. One critic in Cannes referred to it as a “French Connection for the drug-fuelled Mexico-US border war,” so expect tension, moral ambiguity and no happy endings.

After a grizzly discovery courtesy of the Mexican drug Cartels, by-the-book CIA kidnapping specialist Kate Macer (Blunt) volunteers to be part of a special task force led by freelancers Matt Graver (Josh Brolin) and the enigmatic Alejandro (Benicio del Toro). She thinks they’ll be trying to stem the flow of drugs from the US side of the border, but soon she learns that she’s working in a situation where the boundaries have been moved. On her first assignment a wild public shootout leaves a dozen people dead, but yet violence is so common that a showdown at the US -Mexican border is hardly news. “This will make the front page of every newspaper in America.” “No, it won’t even make the paper in El Paso.”

The plan is to disrupt the cartels. Despite prosecuting twice as many drug cases in one year as the previous two years combined, none of the arrests have made a difference. To truly get at the heart of the drug trade they have to break the rules, and, as Graver says, “shake the tree and create chaos.” That means bending the very principles that Macer holds dear.

“Sicario” (it means “hitman” in Spanish) begins with a tightly wound sequence and doesn’t go slack for the next ninety minutes. Director Denis Villeneuve has made a slow burn of a film, deliberately paced, that weaves complex quasi-morality with a sense of hopelessness into an edge of your seat story.

Leading the charge is Blunt. A multifarious mix of vulnerability, stone cold confidence and outrage, she’s the most interesting female action star since Imperator Furiosa.

Del Toro is a badass supreme as a man caught between doing the right thing completely the wrong way. Vicious and malicious, he doesn’t mind collecting a handsome paycheque while quenching his thirst for revenge against the cartel leaders.

The third part of the triangle is Graver, a jovial rule breaker who calls the shots. Brolin, the manliest man currently working on film, is an edgy presence joking and laughing his way through one dangerous situation after another.

The real stars here, however, are director Denis Villeneuve and cinematographer Roger Deakins. Villeneuve treats the story like an onion, peeling off layer after layer, taking his time to get to the core of the story. Deakins, an eleven time Oscar nominee, turns aerial shots of sprawling cities into metaphors for the magnitude of the problems facing the police. Later he transforms a standard night vision raid from videogame action to a wonder of texture and tension.

“Sicario” isn’t a feel good movie about winning the war on drugs. Instead it’s a powerful look at a seemingly unwinnable battle and the toll it takes on its soldiers.

THE WOLFMAN: 3 STARS

Like its star Benicio Del Toro, “The Wolfman” is a little wonky but strangely appealing. The film, which has more to do with the atmospherics of Hammer horror than, say, the theatrics of the lame “Underworld” series, is a perplexing beast that mixes some fairly good shocks with a lifeless lead performance.

Del Toro is Lawrence Talbot, a Victorian-era actor who returns to his ancestral home outside London after his brother is attacked and killed by… something.  Awaiting him at the dusty old country house is his estranged (and just plain strange) father Sir John (Anthony Hopkins) and his brother’s fiancée, Gwen Conliffe (Emily Blunt). Determined to find out who or what mauled his brother, he launches an investigation that leads to a gypsy encampment on a full moon. Guess what? He gets bitten by a werewolf and every full moon transforms into the thing he hates most.

Director Joe Johnston, (the helmer behind “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” and “Hidalgo”) proves he has a knack for old school horror atmosphere—the film is all cobwebs, shadows and candlelight—and action scenes but absolutely none for dealing with the heart and soul of the film—the characters. The Talbots and Gwen dominate the movie but are more sketches of horror movie characters than fully drawn individuals. Hopkins (who gets the movie’s best intentional laughs playing the Worst. Father. Ever.) and Blunt squeak by on acting chops alone, but Del Toro, who is in nearly every scene, isn’t so lucky.

Perhaps he was poorly cast or perhaps he isn’t really trying, it’s hard to tell. He doesn’t have a natural flair for the courtly dialogue that seems to roll off the British tongues so easily, but then again, the dialogue doesn’t exactly sparkle. When your most memorable line is, “I will kill all of you,” (repeated twice for emphasis) you know more time was spent on the set decoration (which is great) and the transformation scenes than the words.

Despite lots of dramatic moments—long stares, meaningful glances—there is little actual drama. The story is pure B-movie horror and exists solely as a vessel to keep things afloat until we get to the action scenes and the Holy Grail of every wolfman movie, the all important man to beast transformation.

On that score the movie entertains. Blood squirts, a disembodied hand shoots a gun and more blood squirts. It’s a gory little flick that takes off after a slow start with some decent jolts (once it gets over using loud sounds to create tension) and two great transformation scenes courtesy of special effects wiz Rick Baker.

“The Wolfman” isn’t going to do for werewolves what “Twilight” and “True Blood” have done for vampires—werewolves are too hairy to be sexy—but despite its flaws is a howlingly fun Saturday afternoon matinee movie.