Hell in Yankee land

Howdy, Schlubs! Just wanted to give a quick shout that Glaive #2 is out now, featuring a collaged essay by yours truly! Also, my recap of Isles of Insanity is now available in Tabletop & Wargame Digest #1, along with plenty of other fantastic DIY goodness.

If you’re new here from the mini-scene, welcome! This newsletter is mostly focused on movies, but since I’ve fallen in love with making minis over the past year, I’m always looking for opportunities to shoehorn them in. On that note, I’m prepping for a miniature project I’m beyond stoked for in 2026—so keep an eye out!

Emily Blunt and Daniel Kaluuya

*Mild spoilers for Sicario below. TW: sexual assault, ICE.*

I love a bootleg T-shirt. The last few years have been an embarrassment of riches for annoying movie people like me, who will gladly spend money on baggy black shirts covered in grainy stills, esoteric jokes, or production logos from our favorite flicks.

A few weeks ago, I nearly pulled the trigger on buying a shirt for Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario (2015). Besides the fact that I don’t have much of a bootleg-shirt budget, I began to second-guess the optics of wearing such a piece while dick-brained thugs assault Latino communities across the country and “jihadist drug cartels” are being used as a casus belli to go to war with Venezuela.

I wanted to see how my beloved Sicario (a movie I once included in my Best of the Decade) held up 10 years after its release. Would it be a prescient look at how the global war on terror has infected all branches of our government? Or would it be a jingoistic “Hoorah!” still screaming out into 2025?

Set in the scrublands along the U.S.–Mexico border, Sicario follows FBI Special Agent Kate Mercer (Emily Blunt) as she joins CIA chiller Matt (Josh Brolin) and consultant Alejandro (Benicio del Toro) on an extralegal mission to destabilize the Sonoran cartel. Written by Hell or High Water (2016) scribe and chud-mogul Taylor Sheridan, Sicario is a southern-border riff on The Silence of the Lambs (1991), with Kate as Clarice and Alejandro as Hannibal. Except in this retelling, Clarice doesn’t have much of a character, and Hannibal Lecter is actually Solid Snake.

First things first: as a thriller, the movie is sick as hell. From the exploding house of corpses in the opening minutes to the final left-turn assassination mission, Sicario has the juice. Villeneuve may have solidified himself as a blockbuster action director with the Dune series, but Sicario still holds his most electric set pieces. If anything, it feels like an audition for what was to come. The fly-infested bodies hidden in the walls of a suburban Arizona home hang eerily like Niander Wallace’s failed replicants on display in Blade Runner 2049 (2017). The stark transitional landscape shots would also repeat in 2049, with the bird’s-eye view of its megacities resembling circuitry and the pale hills of the southern border resembling flesh. And although Alejandro’s mansion infiltration has more in common with Metal Gear Solid, it’s hard not to imagine it as a precursor to Villeneuve’s upcoming James Bond reboot.

Looking backward as well as forward, Villeneuve’s comps to Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs are clear even beyond the script. As an outsider (an FBI agent and a woman), Kate is both the most important and the least important person in the room. When she is first briefed on Matt’s mission, a boardroom of men leer down the barrel of the camera at her and the audience, like so many iconic shots from Lambs. In contrast, her outsider status also makes Kate invisible. As she enters another briefing at a clandestine Delta Force base, the camera shoots the attending soldiers and lawmen from behind. Conversations are muffled, lacking context. She is the last one to know where they’re going or who they’re targeting. Often, she’s simply not told either.

That lack of information not only makes for a captivating mystery but holds the tension like a garrote. Case in point: the convoy into Juárez. Matt, Alejandro, Kate, and a convoy of black SUVs pierce through the heart of the Mexican border city to extradite Guillermo (Edgar Arreola), the brother of a cartel lieutenant. When not shot from a detached overhead view, the POV is Kate’s—rattling around in the backseat as Juárez police trucks (with ISIS-style machine gun mounts) race by her window. It’s a gruelingly tense ride past civilians leading normal lives and decapitated cartel victims hung from an overpass—all quickly glimpsed from the backseat. A brief calm rears its head once they arrive at the jail, but Alejandro quickly stamps it out.

“Nothing will happen here,” Alejandro says. “If they try anything, it’ll be at the border.”

They’re only halfway through.

Benicio del Toro

As much as I am loath to give Taylor Sheridan any credit, Alejandro is one of the coolest characters in recent movie history. Suave in white linen suits and terrifying with Benicio’s gravely demeanor, he stands apart from the other Delta Force operators that make up the CIA task force. As Matt’s “birddog” for most of the film, Alejandro calmly tortures two of Matt’s prisoners. When a corrupt cop (a pre-super-star Jon Bernthal) tries to kill Kate, Alejandro wet-willies him into submission—sticking a finger so far up his ear canal that the man breaks. The other, Guillermo, is straddled by Alejandro while tied to a chair. Alejandro’s crotch shoved directly into Guillermo’s bloody face.

“Now I’ll show you what is hell in Yankee land,” he says.
While the torture that follows isn’t shown, it’s clearly meant to evoke sexual assault. Villeneuve obviously isn’t condoning torture, but it adds to the various disquieting elements that seem to be the direct policy of the United States government and our allies.

You can view that torture, state-sanctioned regime change, clandestine action on foreign soil, and overall criminality as a simple truth as to what the U.S. already does, but the framing still stands suspect. As viewers, we want to see the explosions, the action, and the gunfights. Kate, whose main character trait is stubbornness, lands in the “Skylar White Zone.” As an adherent to the law, she’s always the one standing in the way of the action. Matt and Alejandro are evil men, but they’re the only ones moving the plot forward, so naturally, the audience will look on their actions more favorably.

Before the convoy into Juárez, Matt shoots down Kate’s protests by bringing back the bombed house from the movie’s opening.

“In six months, every single house you raid will be rigged with explosives.”

It’s the type of fear-mongering your chud relative might repost, but the movie paints the cartel as capable of terrorism at that scale. While peeling through the streets of Juárez, I was taken back to the opening Afghanistan mission in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Players escort a convoy of military vehicles through a claustrophobic cityscape—each window a potential opening for terrorist fire. In Sicario, the retaliatory attack happens at the border, but it paints Juárez in the same light: a city in need of American military action.

Josh Brolin, Jeffrey Donovan, Edgar Arreola

The portrayal of Mexican civilians in the film borders on lackluster and racist. In an attempt to show how cartel and U.S. violence has infiltrated all walks of life, civilians in Juárez and detained immigrants stateside stare at the camera doe-eyed and without agency. This is ham-fistedly brought into the central narrative with the character Silvio (Maximiliano Hernández), a Sonoran cop who runs drugs for the cartel. We cut to his seemingly normal life with his wife and son as he eats breakfast and chats about soccer practice. Beyond those inert interjections, his role remains a mystery for most of the plot—yet he’s clearly so doomed that he may as well tell us that he’s only two days from retirement.

It’s a failed attempt to broaden the film outside the world of operators, who are clearly Sheridan’s main interest. Aside from the inaccuracy of there being more than one non-white person on the Delta Force team, Sicario sadly does a decent amount of PR work for these soldiers of fortune. The regime changes and glorified drug smuggling they engage in are accurate, but they’re still depicted as “the best of the best” and loyal to Matt (if not the U.S. government). For anyone interested in the lurid and violent history of Delta Force and American special operations, I’d strongly recommend The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces by Seth Harp.

With all that said, I still love this movie...just from a distance now. There are fantastic performances, especially Daniel Kaluuya in his best role outside of a Jordan Peele flick. The thrumming soundscapes of composer Jóhann Jóhannsson turn the desert into a haunted space, and Roger Deakin’s cinematography is one of a kind, making a parking lot as captivating as soldiers disappearing into the void of sunset.5 In a vacuum, it’s bad men doing bad things—Schlub Cinema’s bread and butter. But with all its baggage, Sicario sits in the tier of good movies with terrible politics. Which, sadly, is the defacto tier of most great American movies.

Sicario is available to stream on Netflix.

Special thanks to Robert Flanagan and Bruce Kesselring.