In my movie reviews, I usually try to avoid any spoilers that are not in the trailer or the first half hour of the movie. However, I assume you have seen Sicario (2015), the first film in this series. You can watch the trailer at the end of this post.

Sicario: Day of the Soldado is directed by Stefano Sollima, written by Taylor Sheridanand stars Benicio del Toro, Josh Brolin, Jeffrey Donovan, Isabela Moner, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, and Catherine Keener.

This film is a sequel to the original Sicario film released in 2015. While this was written by the same person, the director and Emily Blunt did not return for the sequel.

The film begins with a series of suicide bombings, blamed on bombers allegedly smuggled across the Mexican border. So the US government uses this as an excuse to go after the cartels smuggling people across the border. But first CIA agent Matt Graver (Brolin) kills some Somali pirates. He then comes up with a plan to cause the cartels to go to war with each other. He reunites with Alejandro Gillick (del Toro) to once again engage in illegal cross-border warfare. Alejandro kills a cartel lawyer in broad daylight, then they kidnap the 16 year old daughter of the rival cartel leader.

This plot is way over-the-top and convoluted. We get to watch Graver kill the family members of pirates simply because he thinks they may have been paid to let a ship pass through untouched. It's a bit much to accept this tactic as being reasonable. With Emily Blunt not returning for this one, we have no character to question the tactics. There is no audience stand-in, which is what made the first one work. Both have lots of violence, but it was the tension in between that made Sicario an intense movie. This film centers on characters as protagonists that, given some thought, should not really be seen as the heroes of the film. Sicario means hitman. Now of course there are plenty of films with hitmen as protagonists, but this is sequel to a film that had a protagonist to stand against Graver and Alejandro and question their actions. Eventually the kidnapped girl, Isabela (Moner), comes to be the sympathetic character the audience needs to get emotionally involved with the story.

There is a subplot involving a teenager getting into cross border human trafficking. It shows another side of the story but it's largely unnecessary except to set up a very unlikely scenario to pull the plot together.

I don't think the movie is as terrible as some critics make it to be. I would have liked a character like Blunt to serve as some sort of moral compass to point out that the main characters are doing horrible things. Some audiences may just cheer with approval as they use a teenage Latino girl as a pawn while inflicting trauma on her. Wow, that sounds familiar. But the film is engaging enough, even if maybe 20 minutes too long.

I loved the original film but this one is not nearly as good. I'll give a C+, because it does have a good cast at least.

This trailer is the property of Columbia Pictures