Movie · 2018 · Action, Crime, Thriller · 2h 2m · R · English
Curator score: 3.5/10 (365.7K ratings)
Some missions need a hitman...others need a soldier.
Overview
Agent Matt Graver teams up with operative Alejandro Gillick to prevent Mexican drug cartels from smuggling terrorists across the United States border.
Ratings
Curator score: 3.5/10
IMDb: 7.1/10
Letterboxd: 3.25/5
Rotten Tomatoes: 62%
Metacritic: 61
TMDB: 6.9/10
Director
Stefano Sollima
Production
Thunder Road, Black Label Media, Columbia Pictures, Lionsgate, Redrum
Cast
Benicio del Toro, Josh Brolin, Isabela Merced, Jeffrey Donovan, Catherine Keener, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Matthew Modine, Shea Whigham, Elijah Rodriguez, Howard Ferguson Jr., David Castañeda, Jacqueline Torres, Raoul Max Trujillo, Bruno Bichir, Jake Picking, Tenzin Marco-Taylor, Alfredo Quiroz, Nick Shakoour, Joseph A. Garcia, J.D. Marmion
Curator Review
Verdict
A harsh, muscular border-thriller with strong atmosphere and a few excellent set pieces, but it lacks the precision and moral complexity that made the first film stand out. It plays more like a grim procedural turned into a blunt-force action movie, with a controversial political edge and a less satisfying final stretch.
Best for
Viewers who want bleak, hard-edged crime action
Fans of military-ops and cartel-war tension
People who like cold, procedural violence over character warmth
Audiences open to provocative, morally ugly thrillers
Skip if
You want the intelligence and visual elegance of the original Sicario
You’re sensitive to exploitative or politically loaded terrorism imagery
You prefer nuanced characters and cleaner thematic payoff
You want a suspense thriller with emotional uplift
Overview
Sicario: Day of the Soldado is built to feel mean, opaque, and relentless. It has the same sun-baked dread and covert-ops machinery as its predecessor, but the sequel swaps ambiguity for escalation, pushing the story into a harsher, more cynical register. The result is often gripping, especially when it leans into its procedural ruthlessness and the uneasy chemistry between Brolin and del Toro.
Worth noting
What it loses is balance. The film’s political framing is blunt to the point of self-sabotage, and its attempt to pivot into a more conventional rescue-and-revenge thriller undercuts some of the earlier menace. Still, there’s craft in the way it stages border crossings, ambushes, and betrayals, and the movie’s refusal to soften its world gives it a nasty, memorable texture.
Bottom line
If you come in wanting a sequel that deepens the original’s ideas, this is likely a disappointment. If you want a hard, ugly genre piece that treats state violence and cartel violence as part of the same machine, it has enough force to justify the watch.
Top Letterboxd reviews
Elle Driver (2.5★) · 2587 likes
The first time I watched Sicario I said "if Denis Villenueve hadn't made this movie, it wouldn't be good" and now I know that I was right
lauren (3★) · 893 likes
all of these characters getting abducted and yet none of them, not even ONE, remembered to keep a money clip with $50 on them to throw in case of emergency
Cameron Howe (2★) · 797 likes
"So that's it, huh? We're some kind of Sicario 2: Soldado"
davidehrlich (2★) · 629 likes
“Sicario: Day of the Soldado” is a mean fucking movie. That’s sort of its thing. Much like the previous installment of this unlikely franchise, the film drapes itself in darkness so that it can focus our attention on any stray specks of light; one early shot, in which the white halo of a helicopter spotlight tracks a brown man as he sprints towards the Texas border during the dead of night, provides a convenient visual metaphor.
It’s also a hard… more
matt lynch (3★) · 495 likes
For most of its length a suitably ostentstiously gnarly take on collateral damage from conflicts we engineered for ourselves. Completely lacking in subtlety or even much nuance, sure, but also as unflinching as its predecessor as far as the grim realities at the intersection of clandestine state-sponsored warfare, narcotraffic and its economics, and the self-justification of violence, giving you almost nothing to hold onto except the inevitability of a hopelessly corrupt system continuing to perpetuate itself. Then it obnoxiously tries to grow a moral compass in the last 15 minutes. Don't fucking do that, guys, none of us wears it so well.
2007 · Crime, Thriller, Western · 2h 2m · R · Curator 9.6/10 (3.1M ratings) · Where to watch: fuboTV, Paramount Plus Premium, Paramount Plus Essential, MGM Plus, Philo
Bleak violence, fatalism, and a relentless sense of menace in a border-adjacent crime world.