Sicario review – Emily Blunt at the sharp end in war on drugs

When I saw Denis Villeneuve’s stomach-turningly gruesome narco thriller Sicario at Cannes this year, it struck me he had pinched Michael Mann’s style – and pinched his crown, too, like it or not. Perhaps it’s impossible to see a convoy of black SUVs speeding across an urban landscape in a film without thinking of Mann, but Villeneuve certainly carries off the borrowing with style.

The resemblance struck me again this week watching this film a second time, along with the thought that Villeneuve was probably taking notes during Kathryn Bigelow’s Bin Laden thriller Zero Dark Thirty – particularly for those extended special-ops attack scenes filmed in night vision, as if on an alien planet. He maybe even did the same thing with the Coens’ No Country for Old Men, though that is maybe because of the presence of Josh Brolin, and the fact that it is also shot by cinematographer Roger Deakins.

The title is cartel slang for “assassin” or “hitman”, evidently derived from the first-century Sicarii zealots of Judea, though the word is never spoken out loud in the script; screenwriter Taylor Sheridan defers the revelation of how it really applies here to the end of drama, and this disclosure ties up its attendant issues of justice versus revenge, idealism versus cynicism and how American justice is to be applied beyond US borders without anything as quaint as a formal declaration of war.

Emily Blunt plays Kate, a young FBI agent specialising in the relatively uncontentious field of kidnap-victim recovery. She finds herself co-opted into the US Homeland Security war on drugs: a new war on terror whose strategies have been repurposed and relegitimised. After a truly horrendous experience uncovering a cartel-owned safe house full of corpses in Arizona, Kate is asked if she wants to go after the guys ultimately responsible. She agrees, and admits deeply disturbing new men into her life.


Her boss for this mission will be swaggeringly irresponsible and studiedly obnoxious special agent Matt Graver, played by Brolin. There is also a second man, who appears to be Matt’s boss, though he is a civilian consultant from Colombia: Alejandro, played by Benicio Del Toro, courteous and even fatherly towards Kate, solicitous for her well-being, quietly traumatised by some event in his own past. When Kate asks Alejandro what’s going on, he coolly replies: “You’re asking me how a watch works. For now, let’s just keep an eye on the time.”

The plan seems to be to “dramatically overreact” to the safe house situation, in Matt’s words, by arresting a known cartel member with maximum publicity, in order to provoke the drug moguls into high-tailing it back to Mexico and thus revealing who the real players are and making valuable intel gains for arrests. Straight-arrow Kate is fine with all this, until she suspects that Matt and Alejandro are CIA, and what they are actually planning is a deniable multiple-murder attack raid over the border into Mexico itself, and also suspects that these acts of violence against the Mexican enemy are theatrical displays conducted partly to gain trust with the home team and see how operatives are going to bear up under fire. And there is a second level of duplicity and bad faith behind even this, relating to Alejandro’s background.

The tenor and texture of the movie are established with that truly horrible scene at the very beginning where the FBI storm the house. It has its own sheen of horror, aided by the groaning orchestral chords in the musical score from composer Jóhann Jóhannson. The scene lays down a marker for the film’s status as something like a forensic thriller and in its way a procedural thriller, in which the covert procedure itself is the crime.

When Blunt first comes on in all the tough-guy hard-body gear, it is a bit implausible. But she brazens out any possible absurdity with great acting focus and front. She delivers a real star turn, mixing confidence, bewilderment and vulnerability: all the more difficult being up against Brolin and Del Toro, who themselves give huge performances with bells and whistles hooting and clanging.

For me, Sicario is a step forward for Villeneuve: it is less discursive, less reflective than movies such as Prisoners (2013) and Incendies (2010), although I always thought the cerebral content of these pictures was a little supercilious. This is a real white-knuckle thriller, with screeching feedback notes of fear and paranoia, which plays out in a very satisfying atmosphere of pure nihilist ruthlessness.

A Syrian Love Story review – a searing insight into a marriage under fire

A family at war … A Syrian Love Story

Sean McAllister’s documentary about a family of Syrian refugees in Europe would be compelling at any time. Now it is unmissable. This is about love, but it could as well be called A Syrian Rage Story or A Syrian Despair Story. It is the tragic portrait of a disintegrating marriage; the story of two people whose love has been hammered by fate, history and each other.

These are not refugees as we are encouraged to understand them by the nightly news: nameless poor people to whom the prosperous west can respond with pity or guilt. These refugees don’t want to be passive recipients of compassion, but active participants in their own destiny. Above all, they are angry. Their anger floods the screen.

McAllister begins his story in 2009, when Syria was being marketed to westerners as a glamorous, cosmopolitan new tourist destination with ancient culture and monuments as important as anything in Greece and Turkey. And so McAllister begins his movie with a brutal twist of irony, a subliminal flash-forward to a later reality in which our certainties about the Arab spring have been overtaken by the existence of Islamic State. In the capital Damascus, McAllister meets Amer Douad, a Palestinian activist from thea coastal town of Tartus who has a heart-rending story to tell. While in prison, Amer fell in love with a fellow inmate, Ragdha Hassan, a beautiful leftwing Syrian activist against the Assad regime. Now they have three children: Shadi, Kaka and Bob, but she is back in prison and Amer must raise them on his own. McAllister is present with his camera as day by day, week by week, Amer and the children lavish their love on the idea of an absent wife and mother. When Ragdha is finally freed, their joy is overwhelming.

Ragdha Hassan in A Syrian Love Story

But then McAllister is briefly imprisoned by the regime; his friendship makes Amer and Ragdha’s position in Syria untenable. They move, first to the Palestinian enclave of Yarmouk camp, outside Damascus, then to Lebanon, and finally to Paris, having been granted refugee status by the French government. But their marriage is coming apart and McAllister records its breakdown from 2009 to the present.

Raghda is suffering from post-traumatic stress at her brutal jail treatment; she is pierced with guilt at having effectively deserted her comrades’ struggle against Assad, and at becoming an irrelevance herself, washed up on a far shore away from a battle she considers crucial to her identity. Ragdha becomes filled with resentment and depression, and McAllister’s camera captures the way her face, once alight with beauty and fun, becomes clouded and pained. Amer’s face, too, becomes older: hunted, almost furtive, a man with secrets. The film allows us to consider the awful thought that the couple were happiest apart, when they had only the tragically exalted idea of each other. Love depended on prison. Now he accuses her of being impossible to live with, of being arrogant and simply nettled at her own loss of status. Amer’s love curdles into machismo as he demands Ragdha attend to the duties of motherhood. There are walkouts from the family home, suicide attempts and accusations of infidelity.

Incredibly, McAllister was there for a great deal of this. The scenes look real enough. It takes its toll on the children, although their son Kaka emerges as exceptionally perceptive and smart. As a little boy in Syria, he is asked by McAllister about the Assad tyranny: “Does it make you want to leave? Live somewhere else?” He replies: “No, fight.” His views as a teenager in Paris are very different. As for Amer, he begins by speaking to McAllister about Ragdha like this: “She is a strong woman; I am a very weak man.”

Perhaps he has foretold their destiny. But the heartwrenching thing is that her strength and his weakness – as he perceives it – might not have been a problem, had they been able to stay in Syria. Who can tell? It could have been the agony of Syria that destroyed their relationship, or it might have fallen apart in any case. McAllister and his camera might have accelerated the breakdown, though it is just as likely he provided valuable therapy. Even at the end, Amer and Ragdha clearly have feelings for each other. This is love among the ruins.

Eddie Redmayne in first trailer for transgender biopic The Danish Gir

Could Eddie Redmayne win his second Oscar in a row? ... the first trailer for The Danish Girl has landed. Photograph: PR

After winning the best actor Oscar for his portrayal of Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything, Eddie Redmayne is hitting the awards circuit again for his role in The Danish Girl.

The trailer for the drama, directed by The King’s Speech’s Tom Hooper, has just arrived and it gives us a closer look at the fact-based tale. Redmayne stars as Einar Wegener, one of the first recipients of sexual reassignment surgery, who became Lili Elbe.

The film chronicles her journey in the 1920s and her role in a love triangle with her illustrator wife and childhood friend, played by Alicia Vikander and Matthias Schoenaerts. Ben Whishaw and Amber Heard also star.

It’s a film that’s almost come to the screen on numerous occasions but always with two female leads (Charlize Theron was once linked to the role). Transgender activists have criticised the choice of Redmayne as they believe it should have been given to someone who has undergone the transition themselves. But director Hooper has defended his decision.

“Eddie was really the person I wanted to make the film with, and I was very passionate about that,” Hooper said to Screen Daily. “I was a great believer in him as an actor. I think also there’s a certain gender fluidity that I sensed in him, that I found intriguing and it led me to think he might be a really interesting person to cast in this role.

“I felt that there was something in him that was drawn to the feminine,” he added. “That was something that I felt he might be interested to explore further.”

The Danish Girl is set to have its world premiere at the Venice film festival on Saturday, 5 September, and will hit US cinemas on 27 November and UK cinemas on 1 January.

American Ultra review: bong ho action comedy puts Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart in a stupor

Freakin’ out... Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart in American Ultra Photograph: Alan Markfield/AP

Summer 2015: the year half-cocked, medium-budget spins on The Bourne Identity made their way to the American theaters. First there was Self/Less, in which an aging Donald Trump-ish developer transfers his consciousness into a Ryan Reynolds special forces fighter, and now there’s American Ultra.

Jesse Eisenberg plays Mike Howell, a convenience store clerk in Nowheresville, West Virginia, whose primary activities include tokin’ weed, being a bit of an anxious space-case and not-deserving his saintly girlfriend, Phoebe (Kristen Stewart). One day bad men come to eliminate Mike, but before they do a strange woman comes and “activates” him with a subliminal phrase. Instinctually, he knows how to turn a spoon into a killbot weapon. The very same one with which he was planning to slurp down some Ramen. Oh, man, I’m freakin’ out!

Mike is, naturally, a former CIA asset that has been deprogrammed, had his memory wiped and is now allowed to live a quiet life out in coal country. But sniveling toad Adrian Yates (Topher Grace, the best thing in this movie, and that’s a sentence I’ve never said before) is a CIA up-and-comer that wants to wipe the slate clean of these lingering agents. He sends in some strong men and, well, that’s when the bit with the spoon happens. There are escalations (Connie Britton represents the only one in Langley, Virginia with a conscience) and reveals (turns out K-Stew isn’t sticking with Mike just because she likes the stench of bongwater). The action sequences build in size, but it is a surprisingly tiresome affair.


Another hit men ... John Leguizamo and Jesse Eisenberg in American Ultra Photograph: Alan Markfield/AP

Part of Mike’s programming is that he’ll have a panic attack if he leaves town, so we in the audience are condemned to this one boring location along with him. A big set piece includes Mike and Phoebe racing off to their friend, a drug dealer played by John Leguizamo. No one quite phones in an annoying performance quite like Leguizamo. Not that he’s always terrible (see Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam for a good turn) but when he’s doing his cussin’, wigged-out schtick in supporting roles he’ll make you pray for a projector malfunction. (A loop of the character Freek from the 2009 Neveldine/Taylor dud Gamer is what would be waiting for me in Room 101).

There’s chasing, fighting, hiding, urgent telephone calls and the introduction of what screenwriting hacks these days call a “big bad.” It’s a fellow mindscaped agent called Laugher, unleashed to take down our cornered hero all the while cackling like The Joker. This sort of thing is typical of film-makers who have a surface understanding of what they eventually want on the screen, but no clue how to get there. Rather than trusting an actor (in this case Walton Goggins) to craft a memorable character, he’s burdened with a preposterous, comic book-like gimmick. (The rest of the movie, as silly as it is, is ultimately played as if it is the real world.) It’s a chump move indicative of the dry script by writer Max Landis (Chronicle) given absolutely zero spark by director Nima Nourizadeh (Project X).

Eisenberg and Stewart in American Ultra Photograph: Alan Markfield/AP

There are, however, a few decent moments in American Ultra. It’s nicely edited, which sounds like a backhanded compliment, but the sequences of convenience store tedium, flash-floods of memory and one big slo-mo shoot ‘em up showdown comes together in slick and engaging ways. (There are two credited editors. Bill Pankow has worked on a number of Brian De Palma’s better movies, and Andrew Marcus worked with Merchant-Ivory Films. These unlikely connections may at least secure American Ultra as an expert level entry in some extreme bar trivia some day.)

Unfortunately both Eisenberg and Stewart, both frequently brilliant, are on unsure footing here. The movie simply doesn’t know if it wants to be Jason Bourne or Cheech and Chong. A few comic throwaways work (few mutter quite like Eisenberg) but the thriller side of the picture is airless, as is the love story. There’s also a coda completely at odds with the thesis of the film, which I will not spoil, but leads me to wonder why we’re suddenly supposed to cheer for an organization we’ve been rooting against the whole time. Ultimately, American Ultra proves that it’s often best to let sleeping agents lie.

Telugu epic Baahubali smashes box-office record in Bollywood takedown

Overwhelming debut … Baahubali Photograph: PR

The winner

Spin-offs have been a desperate last throw of the dice for animation franchises: Puss-in-Boots, Planes and, most recently, Penguins of Madagascar were box-office low points for, respectively, the Shrek, Cars and Madagascar series. That won’t be an issue for Universal’s irrepressible Minions, whose current $395.7m (£235m) worldwide gross already puts it within spitting distance of parent film Despicable Me’s $543.1m total, after just four weekends. Minions finally opened in the US this frame, with $115.2m comfortably surpassing the recent $90.4m for Pixar’s Inside Out (which cost twice as much) and snatching the second highest animation debut of all time (behind Shrek the Third’s $121.6m).

As noted here a fortnight ago, the dungareed yellow critters have a far higher degree of brand awareness than Puss-in-Boots and Madagascar’s Penguins, which is why talk of $1bn for this spin-off ain’t idle. (That would make it the third such 10-digiter for an on-fire Universal in 2015, after Furious 7 and Jurassic World.) The only question mark is whether the manic and one-dimensional Minions will hold as well through the summer as the two Despicables, which also opened in July but whose soft-centred sentiment gave them broader-than-expected appeal. But the huge start promises a US take in the order of a minimum $300m; on the current 70.9% international split, that points to $1bn overall and possibly more, with many territories yet to kick off.

Franchises tend to proportionally gross more overseas with each instalment, especially with the US gross usually falling off, but if Minions can combine that trend with improved takings across the board, it’ll confirm Despicable Me’s position as the dominant animation franchise of the 2010s. This week’s debuts suggest it’s happening, with figures from Mexico ($19.7m) and Russia ($14.3m) that are 32% and 17% up respectively on Despicable Me 2. So far it’s opened at No 1 in every single country, apart from Australia, where it clashed with Jurassic Park, and India, where local hero Baahubali (see below) was too strong. If it hangs in as well as Despicable Me 2 and beats that film’s $970.8m, it’ll be interesting to see the impact on Despicable Me 3 in 2017. The shift in focus back towards glum evil mastermind Gru could be an anticlimax after the babbling yellow takeover.

Telugu champion

It’s been a slow year financially for Indian cinema, with box-office watchers waiting until late May for romcom sequel Tanu Weds Manu Returns to finally break the 100-crore mark ($15.7m) for local films. Unexpectedly, it’s the Telugu industry – generally a notch down on takings from Bollywood – that has provided the first true barnstormer of 2015, in the shape of SS Rajamouli’s epic saga of a deposed king, Baahubali. Being touted as the most expensive Indian film ever certainly didn’t dampen its prospects (though the $40m budget was technically split over two parts), and early reports suggest it has monstered the 108-crore ($17m) debut weekend record set last Diwali by Shah Rukh Khan’s Happy New Year.

Friday and Saturday saw takings for Baahubali (also filmed in Tamil, and dubbed into Hindi and Malayalam) in the order of 135 crore, and a Hindustan Times piece has pegged the whole weekend at 165 crore ($26m). Worldwide figures aren’t yet available, but it took $3m in the US, within a whisker of the $3.5m for Aamir Khan’s religious satire PK, the highest-grossing Indian film worldwide. So Baahubali should have placed in the vicinity of sixth or seventh on the global chart, minimum. Most heartening is that Rajamouli’s film was warmly reviewed: the Guardian called it “a near-perfect balance between physicality and poetics”, and Times of India said “the larger-than-life execution matches [Rajamouli’s] grandiose vision”. So, in contrast to the likes of Happy New Year – which the old Bollywood razzle-dazzle routine couldn’t prevent from dropping off embarrassingly – Baahubali has a shot at setting a box-office record for the ages. Or at least until part two, next year.

In a quiet week on the new global-release front, a pause to consider the after-effects of one of the year’s most startling performances. Everyone seemed in agreement that Charlize Theron’s embattled Furiosa, not Tom Hardy’s haunted Max, was the true star of Fury Road. With its theatrical run more or less done now – $359.5m worldwide, making the $150m film a modest success – what impact will it have on her career? This intense performer has anchored plenty of substantial material (North Country, The Burning Plain, Young Adult), and in the wake of her 2004 Oscar win for Monster, found herself in bankable blockbuster territory once before with sci-fi thriller Aeon Flux. That, making $52m on a $62m budget, didn’t work out – and is perhaps why Warner Bros thought she wasn’t a surefire marketing element for Fury Road, whose feminist aspect went completely uncommunicated prior to the first reviews. But Theron deserves credit for spurring the fourth Mad Max film to the frenzied pitch that made it such a treat. So, equally, she deserves a mainstream project that not only exploits her natural screen authority, but is set up as a true test of her bankability – and is promoted accordingly. Fury Road – which might have taken more if it had explicitly targeted female filmgoers – surely has earned Theron the benefit of any doubt. At 39, she may not get many more chances.

Beyond Hollywood

Other than Korean north-south thriller NLL: Battle of Yeonpyeong, holding firm in its third week just outside the global top 10, it was all Chinese traffic taking advantage of the country’s Hollywood blackout period. In a big week for the present roaring trade in lightweight, gooey, coming-of-age hankie-dabbers, newcomer Forever Young edged out the fourth entry in the prolific Tiny Times franchise, about four Shanghai BFFs, $38.1m to $36m. The former is the feature-length debut of TV host He Jiong, spinning out a hit song he recorded a few years ago into a tale of performing-school love and woes. The Sydney Morning Herald review intriguingly suggests that, were it not for the censor board, the film might be more inclined to delve further into its lingering homoerotic undertone. In 10th place on the global chart, with $10m, was Monkey King: Hero Is Back, a 3D animated take on the apparently indefatigable local literary linchpin last seen in Donnie Yen’s box office-conquering version early last year. Down in 12th place, Chen Kaige’s neo-wuxia Monk Comes Down the Mountain, covered in last week’s column, dropped a pretty precipitous 78% – possibly hounded out by the flashier contemporary offerings.

The future

Marvel closes Phase 2 of operations, hoping to repeat last summer’s out-of-leftfield Guardians of the Galaxy triumph with the similarly goofy Ant-Man, and shrinking Paul Rudd in order to elevate him to blockbuster leading-man status – surely the first such inverted tack on star-making since Rick Moranis and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids? This new, potentially tender shoot of the Marvel meta-franchise, opening day-and-date in 50 territories, has tough competition from Minions. A box-office return at the lower end of the spectrum for the company (somewhere between the $65.7m for Thor and $94.3m for Guardians) looks more likely for its US debut. Pixels, Sony’s hipster-friendly blockbuster in which Earth is under attack from a blocky Pac-Man, Donkey Kong and other 80s arcade denizens, pops a first coin in the slot in South Korea, before a 40-something-country rollout the following frame. And Bollywood stumps up some proper competition for Baahubali in the shape of Salman Khan’s latest, Bajrangi Bhaijaan, on release to capitalise on the Muslim superstar and Alan Cumming lookalike’s fan base as Ramadan winds up. With Khan’s appeal against a five-year-sentence for running over a homeless man still hanging over him, the new film’s plot – a magnanimous Indian fella helps a stranded, mute Pakistani woman get back over the border – has the awkward ring of a timely public-relations overture.

Top 10 global box office, 10-12 July

1. Minions, $239.5m from 57 territories. $395.7m cum – 70.9% international; 29.1% US
2. Terminator Genisys, $61m from 61 territories. $224.8m cum – 69.4% int; 30.6% US
3. Jurassic World, $39.8m from 66 territories. $1.46bn cum – 59.7% int; 40.3% US
4. (New) Forever Young, $38.1m from 4 territories. $38.6 cum – 99.9% int; 0.1% US
5. Inside Out, $36.2m from 45 territories. $435.4m cum – 34.9% int; 65.1% US
6. (New) Tiny Times 4.0, $36m from 1 territory. $54m cum – 100% int
7. Magic Mike XXL, $19.9m from 31 territories. $68.9m cum – 29.7% int; 70.3% US
8. Ted 2, $18m from 36 territories. $124.8m cum – 42.6% int; 57.4% US
9. (New) Gallows, $11.2m from 14 territories – 10.7% int; 89.3% US
10. (New) Monkey King: Hero Is Back, $10m from 1 territory. $11.5m cum – 100% int

• Thanks to Rentrak. This week’s figures are based on estimates; all historical figures unadjusted, unless otherwise stated.