136 Esquire — June 2018
James Cagney, the John Wayne of the drugs
war movie. He’s been working in the genre, on
and of, from Drug Wars: the Camarena Story, in
1990, to Sicario 2: Soldado, in 2018.
Without wishing to overburden a popu-
lar entertainment with meaning, Del Toro sees
more in Sicario and its sequel than a pair of syl-
ish shoot-’em-ups. he original, released in 2015,
was a bold and original thriller, directed by
Denis Villeneuve, the gited Canadian who most
recently released Blade Runner 2049. It was shot
by the magnificent British cinematographer
Roger Deakins, favourite of the Coen brothers,
from a screenplay by the Hollywood writer of
the moment, Taylor Sheridan (Hell or High Water,
Wind River), a Texan apparently in the process of
single-handedly draging the Western into the
21st century, like a cowboy pulling a roped steer.
Sicario starred Emily Blunt as an FBI straight-
shooter drawn into the mury world of covert
operations on the US-Mexican border, along-
side Josh Brolin’s maverick spook and Del Toro’s
mysterious gunman.
Like all good Westerns, Sicario has ambi-
guities and uncertainties: who is a white hat,
who a black hat? It has explosions, ambushes,
convoys of blacked-out SUVs racing through
the desert. It has wisecracks and grisly dis-
coveries and an air of dread confusion, as well
as parched desert scenery to stir John Ford
and bloody gunfights that might make Sam
Peckinpah proud.
For Alejandro, with his crumpled suit and
his faraway squint, the fight against the nar-
co-traickers is personal. He is quiet, remote,
fastidious — check out the precision with
which he folds his trousers before packing
them — and haunted, and also human: he is
kind to Blunt’s traumatised newbie. But he is a
man on a mission, and we are given to under-
stand that he is an expert in the administration
of pain. In one scene, even Brolin’s gung-ho
CIA man steps out of an interview room so
that he won’t witness Alejandro waterboard-
ing a captive. At another moment, he wets his
finger and sticks it deep into a man’s ear. hese
are not high-tech torture methods.
he sequel has quite a lot to live up to, then.
And it must do without Villeneuve, Deakins
and Blunt. For Sicario 2: Soldado, the first two
have been replaced by the Italian Stefano
Sollima, no stranger to violent crime as direc-
tor of the excellent TV series Gomorrah, and
Ridley Scott’s favourite cinematographer,
Dariusz Wolski, to summon the sun-bleached
vistas and the night-vision shootouts. Blunt’s
character, meanwhile, had served her purpose.
Not to give too much away, but the sequel’s
answer to the first film is not to back off and
play it safe. Soldado doubles down on the vio-
lent spectacle. We get a suicide atack on a super-
market, skydiving commandos over the Horn
of Africa, Mexicans smugling Islamists across
the US border, and — perhaps less fancifully
— the Americans indulging in kidnapping and
atempting state-sponsored murder.
Brolin, as the swagering cowboy jock, gets
many of the best lines, and he delivers them
with relish, but Alejandro becomes the film’s
central figure. He’s still reticent, still enigmatic,
but a plot twist allows Del Toro to develop his
character, to find “the moraliy inside the mon-
ster”, as he puts it.
“I’ve played every angle on the drugs,” he
says, sipping his espresso. “I’ve done the guy on
drugs, the guy who sells the drugs. I’ve done
the policeman who’s trying to survive and I’ve
done the guy who goes, ‘I’m gonna take you
out.’ And the functioning guy who goes crazy
on drugs.
“I like to think these characters are more
than just that. I like to think there are other
levels to it, besides drugs. Gangster movies,
Westerns, they have the potential of many
things that great writers touch. hey have all
the dramatic avenues of great theatre writers.”
The drug movie, he says, is not new.
“Scarface in 1983, he French Connection before
that, he Man with the Golden Arm before that,
and we can go even further back.” And as long
as the issue is unresolved, people will make
films about it. Not just any people: the best
writers and directors.
“I’m not saying I’m glad there’s people out
there dying from the drugs and the violence,"
he says, “just so I can come to the Sunset
Marquis, drink an orange juice and flap my
wings, talking to people from nice magazines
in England. But I’ve been lucy to be here at
the right moment.”
He doesn’t know what he’s doing next, but
there’s a chance he might make a film called he
Corporation, based on a book about the real-life
Cuban mob boss in America, José Miguel Batle
Sr, a man known as El Padrino: the Godfather.
Meanwhile, Taylor Sheridan is working on the
script for a third Sicario film. Might he be inter-
ested? Yes, he might.
Wouldn’t he like, just once, to star in
a comedy?
“A romance,” he says.
Yes! A romance. Perfect. Maybe he should
play a humble Everyman, a middle-aged corpo-
rate stif in a suit, who works in an oice and
drives a Volvo, who pays the bills and puts the
bins out and picks up the dry cleaning and wor-
ries about his weight and...
He raises a hand to stop me.
“I’m bored,” he says.
No, wait, hear me out! What about an
overwrought wedding planner, or a brittle
masseuse?
But it’s too late. He’s vanished again.
Sicario 2: Soldado is out on 29 JuneGrey coton-jersey long-
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