Corruption, vigilantes, drug cartels, murder, and smuggling across the Mexican border – the latest effort from director Denis Villeneuve (Prisoners, Incendies) has all the elements of a suspenseful thriller. Dropping FBI field agent Kate (Emily Blunt) and the audience into a web of opaquely- motivated savagery, the layers of geopolitical tensions unfurl slowly. Unfortunately, the loose threads of Taylor Sheridan’s screenplay unfurl right along with it.
Blunt is wonderfully natural, all innate intelligence and flinty vulnerability. Her confused determination to discover the truth about the clandestine anti-drug war mission is utterly believable and empathetic. However there’s an uneasy tokenism to her role. Apart from one scene that highlights the specific dangers of being a woman operative (where she has to be saved by a man), her female bystander existence in this typical bro-fest is disappointingly passive. This façade of progressiveness is echoed by a subplot about a Mexican family-man cop, which feels like a mere gesture towards the complexity of the countries’ tangled histories, as we’re otherwise given an American perspective.
However, the purest elements of the film work well. As a CIA agent, Josh Brolin’s macho, shit-eating grin and endless wisecracks are chilling in the face of such atrocity, while Benicio Del Toro’s ambiguous role and motivations act as an unnerving foil. Villeneuve’s action sequences are also deeply effective, the gritty Mexican landscapes carrying stylistic echoes of Michael Mann. Cinematographer Roger Deakins, meanwhile, forges a rich blend of overhead shots, frantic close-ups and shocking bursts of violence to maintain the tension.
Villeneuve possesses a mechanically precise finesse that many directors would dream of, but by sticking too rigidly to the formula of self- important thriller, he undoes some of his own complexity. Ambiguity is interesting: ambiguity by numbers is not.