This week Eric from We Hate Movies and Hooked on TJ Hooker joins us to dissect the much less nuanced sequel to 2015's geopolitical crime thriller Sicario--Sicario: Day of the Soldado Gone from the cast is audience surrogate and moral compass Emily Blunt, while the two antagonists from the first film, CIA agent and CIA asset played by Josh Brolin and Benicio Del Toro, become the sociopathic protagonists in a film about Mexican cartels smuggling Muslim terrorists across the border. Support the show at http://patreon.com/miniondeathcult and get a bonus episode every week directly in your podcast app.
The liberals are destroying California, and conservative humor gone awry... Conservative humor gone awry is going to fascistphonia today, so stay tuned.
We're going to take a few pictures of the desert and how their policies are actually messing it up.
It's not beautiful when you go across that border.
Stay tuned guys, we'll show you exactly what it looks like when people go to school in the desert.
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I'm Alexander Edward.
And I'm Tony Boswell.
And we are Minion Death Cult.
The world is ending, human trafficking, the smuggling of brown bodies over the border, very concerned about, is responsible.
We're documenting it.
What's up, everybody?
We have a very exciting episode today.
We are joined by Eric Siska from We Hate Movies and Hooked on TJ Hooker.
How you doing, buddy?
Hey, thanks for having me.
I think you're the first people to remember the second part.
Hooked on T.J.
Hooker, yes.
T.J.
Hooker, for folks that don't know, is a fascist 1980s television program and it's fun to recap it episode by episode.
Yeah, hell yeah.
We're doing the Lib Firefighter TV show on this podcast channel and you guys are doing the fascist He's a state trooper.
What's his actual... Well, he's a sergeant in the L.C.P.D.
It's not actually the L.A.P.D.
It's kind of like a fictional L.A.
that they're in.
Yeah, so a lot less kills under their belt.
Fictional L.A.s are my favorite L.A.s.
Yeah, we call it Los Santos on the show.
Oh, okay.
I'm a big fan of San Angeles.
That's my favorite fake L.A.
Well, we brought you here today to talk about a fascinating movie called Sicario Day of the Soldado.
I just like to call it Sicario 2.
I think that it's just simpler, gets to the heart of what this movie actually is.
Before we jump in, I have an important question to ask Eric.
I think everybody needs to know this beforehand.
Is it okay to like this movie?
Oh boy.
The first movie, Great and All, and this is like a quality cliff and a half, and the politics of this movie are outrageous.
I missed this movie upon release and I watched it for the first time to talk about it with you guys.
I was shocked it was 2018.
It almost feels like this could be imagined paranoia from way back when, but is it okay to like it?
I try to say it's okay to like any movie, including the Zapruder film or Cannibal Holocaust or what have you, but Maybe not.
I don't know.
Maybe this one's treading the line.
Wow.
Okay.
Can't use that gif anymore of Eric.
So I've been wanting to watch this movie and talk about this movie for years, ever since I saw the trailer for this movie, because I was one of the people who was surprised at how good Sicario turned out to be.
I was not familiar with Denny Villanueva at the time.
I think That was maybe his second or third movie, 2015.
And I was just expecting, oh, just a typical, like, action thriller about operators.
When you watch it, it's actually a beautifully shot, extremely effective thriller about, like, the deep state.
It's about the CIA essentially managing the cartels, installing powers in the cartels, and the way they circumvent U.S.
law by roping in Emily Blunt's character, who is an FBI agent, that Josh Brolin, the CIA agent, needs to attach his team to in order to legally justify the CIA's operating on uh american ground so that is the conflict of that movie is emily blunt's character who's you know still an fbi agent working uh narcos cases at you know at the border
essentially uh basically seeing like the real shit that happens with the cia with the uh the unaccountable violence that happens uh Uh, and at the end of that movie, spoiler alert, if you haven't seen it, uh, Benicio del Toro, who's like a CIA asset of Josh Brolin, who is also, you know, doing extreme violence throughout that movie.
Uh, Yeah, and that's it.
holds a gun to her head in her own apartment, holds her own service weapon to her head, and then forces her to sign a document saying what they did was legal and good.
Yeah.
And that's it.
That, you know, I'll tell you, um, listeners of the show know that, uh, Alex is yet to like really lead me astray.
And this was kind of the beginning, You told me about this movie, about Sicario, and I was like, I don't think I'm going to care about that.
And you're like, no, no, it's really fun, watch it, you'll enjoy it.
And I did.
And that was kind of one of the times I was like, okay, even if it's something I'm not going to be into, you know my taste enough.
To lead me in the right direction.
And then I watched Day of the Soldado and I don't, even if it's for the show, I might resist harder.
Actually, Chris Cabin, We Hate Movies co-host, lend me the Blu-ray of Sicario right before lockdown happened and I can finally give it back to him now.
Finally.
Years later.
Yeah, that guy's got good taste and that won't be the last time that Chris is mentioned in this episode because Sicario 1 and 2 are written by Taylor Sheridan, who is probably most famous now for having created Yellowstone with Kevin Costner, which is about a fascist rancher.
Fascist rancher slash, what is he, like a Bureau of Land Management cop?
Yeah.
He's not a federalist wrangler?
Does he take on the Bundy Ranch at all?
No, he kind of is the Bundy Ranch, but also with a badge.
Yeah, and way richer, even.
The main conflict is there's a new Native American chief, I don't know if that's the right word to use.
I think that's the word they use in the show.
Who is going to be more aggressive against the Yellowstone Ranch now because he went off to the city and got a liberal education and knows how to use the law against real salt-of-the-earth multi-millionaire ranchers Who brand their employees like cattle.
We had Chris on to talk about that show.
Taylor Sheridan also wrote Hell or High Water, which I haven't seen, but I've heard is very good.
Yeah, I remember liking it.
Good little robbery movie.
I think the politics were kind of in the right place on that one, if my memory serves, but it's been a while.
It's like anti-bank, from what I can tell.
Yeah, I believe so, yeah.
And then he also wrote Wind River, and then another movie called Without Remorse.
Which is, I think Michael B. Jordan doing like a Tom Clancy slash John Wick type thing where there's like a tier one Navy SEAL operator whose family is killed by Russian, like Russian agents or something.
So he goes, he goes off the chain, you know, he goes off the grid and hunts them all down.
And that seems to be kind of a theme with Taylor Sheridan is like, These upstanding authority figures who are capable of extreme violence, like finally saying enough is enough and doing even more extreme violence.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
When I first heard about Sicario 2, the most notable thing about it is that Emily Blunt's character is not in it.
She is in the first one providing a necessary avenue for the viewer to observe this world, right?
Because she is the moral center of that movie where she eventually has to pull her gun on Josh Brolin and be like, you can't fucking do this shit.
And then Josh Brolin just shoots her in her vest and leaves her on the ground.
And that movie is like...
I mean they have like private military contractors with them who are all like incredibly creepy people.
Yeah.
They don't seem to be glorified at all.
Josh Brolin's character isn't quite glorified.
Benicio Del Toro's character is absolutely not glorified.
Yeah.
He kills two children at the end of that movie.
They're, like, making rape jokes to Emily Blunt.
Like, it's supposed to put you on edge.
It's not supposed to glorify the operator lifestyle in the least.
This movie, Emily Blunt is not in it, so Josh Brolin, the CIA agent, and Benicio del Toro, his asset, become the main characters of the movie.
Which is always a mistake.
I don't know if you guys remember The Fugitive, and then they did a sequel, U.S.
Marshals, with just Tommy Lee Jones and all those guys, and it didn't work.
I've seen neither of those movies but they sound fun.
The Fugitive you should definitely watch if you ever get like sick or you spend a long time at home in some way.
The next COVID lockdown or quarantine or whatever next disease wave.
It's a really good time with Harrison Ford and it's that one's kind of you know subversive to Big Pharma.
Interesting.
What's fun about this one too is, like you said, the Benicio Del Toro character and the Josh Brolin characters in the first one are these, like, ruthless, and they are ruthless in this movie too, but there's almost points where you're supposed to, like, kind of see their moral compass working.
Yeah.
But you can't because, like you said, we saw them kill two kids at the end of the last movie.
Yeah it's uh the politics of this movie are are if if the politics of the first one were gray uh in the sense where it was like both sides are bad I guess was the message of the first one or like this is why it is the way it is in Mexico uh This one is even more muddled and nonsensical.
It feels a little slapped together.
The promotion for this movie was another red flag for me.
Emily Blunt's character not being the first.
If you look at the posters for this movie, they look like a combination of The Purge and The Expendables.
Oh, totally.
This one poster I'm looking at says Sicario, Day of the Soldado.
And then at the top is Benicio del Toro and Josh Brolin back-to-back firing rifles towards the edges of the poster.
And then at the bottom is a skeleton with Mexican and American flags draped over him like he's the Virgin Mary.
But he's also wearing gold chains and a bandolier.
Stylish.
See, I've been watching a whole lot of Ink Masters lately, and so I didn't even think about it too much when I saw it.
It looks like mall shirts.
Yeah, it looks like when famous stars in straps tried to do the La Familia branch to appeal to Latino culture, and it ended up just doubling down on their appeal to Travis Barker culture.
Yeah.
The first movie was like, oh man, isn't the CIA fucked up?
And like, doesn't the CIA like generate a lot of the problems we supposedly use it to combat?
And then the second movie is just like, isn't the CIA fucking based?
And if you go back and read reactions to the first movie, which of course I did, I have two comments here that I think help like reveal or elucidate why this sequel exists.
Peter Lou Sunset says, and this is from 2016, so this is right after the first one when they I think announced the second one was in development.
To be honest, the heavy focus on Blunt's character was the weakest element of the first film.
Nothing to do with her acting or that it was a female role, it just felt like a huge distraction from the dynamics of the greater whole by what should have been a minor character.
And all of the responses are like that.
It's like, I think if we didn't have Emily Blunt, we would have gotten more extrajudicial assassinations.
Exactly, yeah.
I think she was taking up a little too much screen time with her moral qualms.
Well, I guess it was a little superfluous because, like, what's the point of her if she's just gonna get shot in the chest anyways?
Yeah, well she just got knocked out.
She got a little bruise on her chest.
She's like the conduit for the audience, like being brought into this greater conspiracy through the military organizations that we don't really know what's going on and through her character we start to see that.
I think it's pretty effective in that first movie, like with the El Paso cop trying to kill her in a sexual rendezvous.
Yeah, that's the Punisher, right?
The Netflix Punisher?
Yeah, I think so.
Yeah, that's a good scene.
Daniel Kaluuya is in the movie, too, is our partner.
He's really good in it.
Super.
But when you're watching the first one, like, she knows that she's being asked to work with, you know, they don't even really tell her that they're CIA.
It's just like, we're from the government, ma'am.
Just trust us.
When they talk to Taylor Sheridan about, like, why, you know, why he wasn't writing Emily Blunt's character into the sequel, it's like, well, how could you?
Like, would she really team up with them again after they threatened her with suicide?
Absolutely.
Does there need to be a sequel?
And if you did a sequel, why necessarily follow those two characters from that first movie?
It's a little beyond me that they made this film.
So I have a quote here from The Guardian.
Sheridan said, quote, her arc was complete.
I couldn't figure out a way to write a character that would do her talent justice.
Look at what she went through.
It was a difficult role.
Here I write this lead character and then I use her as a surrogate for the audience.
And you're like, okay, yeah, that all tracks.
That all sounds right.
Quote, I make her completely passive against her own will.
So the audience feels the same impotence.
And you're like, yeah, totally.
That a lot of law enforcement officers feel.
What?
Like, at one point, a law officer makes her feel that way.
Like, the law officer makes her feel, like, helpless and attacks her.
I drag her through hell and betray her in the end.
It was an arduous journey for the character and for Emily.
That character had an arc.
So, reading this is so revealing to me about, like, why he's motivated to write these movies because they are open to interpretation and Heller Highwater, you know, like I said, I haven't seen it, but what's his name?
He's a sheriff, right?
Bridges?
I believe so.
If memory serves, yeah.
And he's kind of a sympathetic figure, I would imagine.
It's been years, but I think that tracks.
I imagine that it's like...
His conundrum, his moral quandary is, wow, do I really just exist to exact the will of the big banks and hunting down these bank robbers?
And it's like, yes, motherfucker.
There's no there's no quandary about it.
You nailed it, you know?
If you look at the other movies that I mentioned in passing, Without Remorse, about a Navy SEAL who felt helpless as Russians gunned down his family or whatever, so he's finally throwing off the rules of engagement.
Great title, huh?
Yeah, yeah.
Doesn't that make you just want to grab a paperback of that or something?
Oh yeah, absolutely.
All of this is, like, why I wanted to talk about this movie, and let's just go into the plot here.
It starts off with some on-screen text.
Every year, thousands of people are smuggled across the border for profit.
The border is run by cartels.
Ooh!
Look at this!
I love the divinity of that.
There can't just be a mom-and-pop coyote, huh?
No, no.
I also like the implication that the border is run by cartels and not like a three trillion dollar agency known as DHS and the Border Patrol.
Oh man, they're just helpless in the face of the cartels.
Yeah, it's not that they like smuggle things across the border.
No, they control the whole thing.
Yeah, and that's the thing about the first movie, you got the elements of like, there are bad guys within this organization, what we're doing is quasi-whatever, but there's also dudes that are working for the cartel in uniform, and in this movie it just feels like, hoorah, America!
Yeah, it's like that happens, but not on our side as much.
It's clearly, everyone else, it happens everywhere else, but not, yeah, not with us.
I also like, this is like such a right-wing talking point, like when you hear about human smuggling or human trafficking, like they mean migration.
They mean like illegal immigration, right?
And that's like the, you know, propaganda, and I'm not saying that like, The coyote industry is a good one, or anything like that, but the reason it exists is because we have these border policies, right?
Like, we're the reason the cartels can, quote, control that aspect of border travel.
We're the reason that they can operate, you know, gigantic drug operations.
So it's just funny to be like, to scare the audience with the idea of illegal immigration in general at like the very beginning of this movie.
Like not only illegal immigration, but like forced immigration.
Like not only are people coming over here to like protect their families, but they're just pushing people over here.
Right?
Yeah.
We get a line where the coyotes are like their sheep.
Treat them like sheep.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, right after we get this quote about how, oh, the border is run by cartels, we see a small group of migrants, you know, 10 or so, who were immediately spotted by two helicopters, you know, military-grade hardware encircling these people.
And it's like, I don't know how I'm supposed to feel about this moment, because all I see is, like, an insane overreaction to people walking across the desert, right? - Mm-hmm. - Yes. - They're about to land and one of the migrants runs off and sort of gets tracked by the helicopter and they're like, "You know, watch out, watch out!
We got somebody who's running away from you!" And they all approach him and he puts down a backpack and you're like, "Oh, fuck." Oh fuck, a migrant with a backpack.
That's like the scariest thing I've ever seen already.
And then he begins to open it and pray, but it's not to like any god I've ever heard of.
It's to some weirdo god that I don't know, in a different language it sounds like.
Yeah, he's praying to Admiral Ackbar now.
Uh, and he, uh, as the, as the Border Patrol approach, uh, with their guns drawn, uh, he sets off an explosive, uh, that, yeah, blows himself up and flattens the, uh, other Border Patrol agents.
Uh, I was worried that he, he, he didn't get him, but, uh, later I think you find out he got him.
So at least, you know, not all was lost in this.
Which is funny, because the rest of the film, all of the murders are pretty fucking gruesome.
This particular explosion is really lackluster.
This is the worst explosion of the whole thing.
It does not start off with a bang.
We're going to get some bangs immediately after, but this one's kind of lame.
Those border patrol agents had way too much dignity.
They just fall back to the ground.
The only thing I thought was inaccurate here was the lack of like cowboys of citizen patrol people doing it.
Oh yeah.
That's the only thing I thought was missing.
I think you do get some of that in Hell or High Water.
I think there are like vigilantes trying to stop the bank robbers.
This scene and this whole like plot of like we're Muslim terrorists are coming across the Mexican border.
It reminded me of a 1980s film Bulletproof starring Gary Busey.
And it's all this type of paranoia existed in the Reagan era as well.
And in that movie you had like Russians and Libyans and like all the bad guys of America against America uniting in Mexico.
And there's a super tank in that movie as well, which I wish we got here, but we don't.
Yeah.
I mean, this is like, it's very Trump era stuff.
You know, it's very Reagan era stuff for sure, but it's like very Trump era stuff.
This is like the right wing talking point of, yeah, we don't know who's coming across the border.
You know, it's probably terrorists.
This is that, you know, general conservative rhetoric, but amped up to like an extremely dumb in your face degree, which is, you know, emblematic of like the Trump era.
Yeah.
Do you think they did this on purpose to try to, you know, cater to that audience?
And I feel like we were getting somewhere around 2020.
There were multiple movies that came out.
I don't remember their titles because who could care?
Like Mark Wahlberg and all these other guys wearing like American hats.
I think Matt Damon was in one of them.
Yeah.
And that was like a whole new genre of film.
I think they were all saving their daughters.
Yeah, exactly.
It's Trump Cinema.
Yeah.
And this is like the perfect storm too because what they do in this one, the whole thing about this is there's a narrative about messaging and having the right narrative and making the bad things you do look acceptable in the media, right?
Which is kind of like this Lib thing, right?
And what they do in the very beginning of this is they give you license to do whatever the fuck you want.
Yeah, because this is what we're fighting against.
We're not just fighting against immigrants.
We're not just fighting against terrorists.
We're fighting against Muslim immigrants who are coming up the Mexican border, and you will not believe what they're going to do.
Yeah, I think the message of this movie is this is the reality that we have to deal with.
And maybe the CIA doesn't do it in the nicest way, but he's trying to do the right thing.
Yeah, to create a good situation, they think.
Yeah, like, I think it's all on the surface there, that just, oh, this is a possibility, this could happen, this is why we have, you know, three helicopters monitoring this two-mile stretch of the border at all times.
And that's what the movie does, right?
It focuses on like, oh, these scary dudes are going to come across the border.
And then later in the film, it just becomes about two fucking kids.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Unrelated to the Muslim angle.
Well, you find out later.
So let me, uh.
That's not all that happens in like the first five minutes of the movie, right?
We have these border patrol agents get flattened and I guess killed by this suicide bomber.
The next day, it's like the aftermath of the scene.
There's caution tape up.
They're sort of the DEA, I think, is there like investigating everything.
And you hear, hey, over here!
Oh, yeah.
It's like, what do we got?
And then the camera zooms in on three prayer rugs and it says prayer rugs and then ominous music plays like you're watching an episode of true detective like you've just seen an effigy to the yellow king yep but it's uh it's prayer rugs it's muslim prayer rugs it's like what wait no god what what direction are they facing east oh my god no
You know what I sure is sick, though, is that the guy who blew himself up, he got himself away from the other people who were trying to get across the border and only blew up DEA people, which I thought was Harbati.
But yeah, I was thinking to myself, like, no, that guy blew up.
Where did those rugs come from?
Uh-oh.
Uh-oh.
So then the very next scene... Also, you would never leave the rug there.
You've got a lot of travel to go.
You've got to pray a couple times a day.
Uh, immediately smash cut to, uh, four, let's just say suspicious looking men, uh, get out of a sedan in a parking lot and walk towards what the camera zooms out to reveal is basically a target department store.
Yes.
It looked like a target to me.
Big Lots almost?
They walk in and it's like all one shot.
So this is like the sequel trying to like mimic the cinematography of the first one, which was very good.
And then I looked up who this cinematographer is.
It's the guy who did like Shawshank Redemption.
Like he's got a, what do you call it?
Like a dossier of really good work.
And so some of these shots are really good, but didn't quite reach the heights of the first one for me.
But this long shot shows all of them kind of walk into the department store and pans out to the exterior of the department store.
And, you know, nothing's happening.
And you're like, oh, what's, you know, what are these four brown guys going to do in this department store?
And then one by one you see explosions happen, like, inside the department store.
And then it cuts to, not even a cut probably, just a pan over to a woman in the front of the department store, a blonde white woman, just beautiful, just gorgeous.
Beautiful baby, oh my lord.
An equally beautiful blonde baby.
A toddler, a six or seven year old girl who's covering her head and trying to walk towards the front.
She's not injured yet.
She's trying to walk towards the doors at the front.
She's trying to walk out of the store while the dude's contemplating blowing himself up in front of the exit.
I don't know.
Head towards the back, lady.
Yeah, maybe go behind the sporting goods.
Maybe don't be a fucking baby and you stop him from doing it.
How about that?
How about throw your baby at him to distract him and then run out the front door?
Yeah, you have to get yourself to safety first.
How else are you going to save the baby if you don't get to safety?
It's like on airplanes where they're like, fix your fucking oxygen first.
Don't worry about the kid.
No, totally.
I like that scene a lot because it went from they all fan out and go to different aisles and the first guy that blows himself he turns around and like so he turns around and faces the entry he walked in then blows himself up then the next one blows himself up the next one blows himself up and then there's like a good 15 seconds of okay well it's over and that was the gnarliest thing I'm ever gonna see but then you see just like this mom and daughter get straight blown up yeah like with the guy like two feet away from them
And it's like, oh shit, and like I said, right now, at this point in the movie, you're like, cool, so whatever they gotta do to make sure they don't blow up any more beautiful Aryan babies, we gotta do it.
No, totally, yeah, they justify the rest of the movie for me.
At this point, I'm happy that Emily Blunt's not in it.
I'm like, thank God, I'm not gonna have to deal with her.
Yeah.
Don't need any wet blankets thrown on this hell inferno that we're about to unleash on the world.
Yeah, the woman is, she's like walking towards the last suicide bomber.
She's like, you don't have to do this, you don't have to do this, and gets closer.
When she's within like six feet from him, he blows them all up.
It's pretty cool.
I'm like hooting in the audience.
I'm like, yeah!
That scene also looks pretty bad.
That explosion looks pretty bad.
I have to say that.
So this event obviously goes viral.
It's all over the news.
Suicide bombers in your target?
More likely than you think.
I mean, they're attacking the wheels of capitalism here.
They didn't say who it was.
I thought it was the president at first, but you find out later it's the Secretary of Defense.
This actor's been in other stuff.
I don't know his name off the top of my head.
Matthew Modine, right?
Yeah, that sounds right.
Yeah, he's been in everything.
He was recently, he was in Full Metal Jacket as Joker.
He was recently in Stranger Things as like the evil doctor.
Okay.
Yeah, he's playing an evil Secretary of Defense in this movie, essentially.
Not, you know, maybe not evil, but like, you know, no-nonsense, ruthless, like our main character.
Secretary of Defense, I think, by definition, right?
True, but I'm trying to get in the headspace of the movie, like, because the movie is portraying him as like, you know, kind of a ruthless guy.
So yeah, he's on the news and he's addressing the nation.
He says, your bombs do not terrify us.
It's like a reference to terror, I guess.
They empower us to deploy something truly terrifying, the full weight of the United States military.
Which is Josh Brolin.
Yeah, it's great.
It's like, oh, you think you guys can do terrorism?
No.
No, just wait.
You don't even know.
Yeah.
With our infrastructure?
Are you kidding me?
And I love that.
I love just like him.
I don't know if this was meant to be an ironic thing written into the movie, but yeah, your bombs do not terrify.
They empower us.
We actually like it when these things happen because we get to justify another trillion dollars to our military budget.
You're basically like gassing me up.
Yeah.
So we cut to uh what the first like five scenes in this movie are all in different locations so it's constantly like giving us you know oh Mexico oh Kansas City where the terrorist attack happened oh uh then you know we're on the news we're in news land uh and now we're in the Gulf of Somalia uh where there's a raid on a compound done by uh tier one operators I think led by Josh Brolin I don't know if you actually see his face
Uh, but they, you know, they snipe all the other guys and black bag one person.
Uh, just put down everybody else.
No problem.
Total silence.
Uh, and they bring him to a, uh, a base in Africa.
Uh, and we have an interrogation scene where, uh, we first see our hero, Josh Brolin.
Who comes into this room.
And of course there's like a waterboarding scene in the first movie, I believe.
There's a lot of like kind of gross power play interrogation scenes in that movie where I think like Benicio Del Toro like stands with his fucking crotch in some guy's face and just like puts his dick like on the guy's shoulder in his face and just stands there.
And it's like not played for laughs.
It's played for like, oh, this is like a weird psychosexual game these two guys are doing with each other.
It's definitely strategic.
We read a study that if you put your dick on someone's shoulder, they're going to break 20 times faster as long as you're playing Africa by Toto in the background.
Harvard did a study on that one time.
Don't threaten me with a good time.
Waterboard me all you want, but I'm not gay, bro.
Don't do that shit to me.
I'll tell you whatever you need.
Yeah, then Josh Brolin gives the whole, like, waterboarding is when we can't torture.
This is Africa.
I could do whatever the fuck I want here.
There are no rules.
Every divorced dad in the theater hooting and hollering.
Yeah, absolutely.
I'm moving to Africa!
It's a back to Africa movement, but for single dads.
But for dads... I'll tell you why, guys.
You know they never do this in the motherland, right?
Uh, so he says, yeah, I don't, uh, I don't need to waterboard you because yeah, waterboarding is when we're not allowed to torture.
Uh, here I can, I can just torture you.
It's fine.
Um, and he says, uh, you're going to tell me whatever I want, uh, without me harming a head on a hair on your head.
You know why?
And then he opens a satellite feed of the guy's house that he's interrogating with his family inside.
And he's like, I'm gonna call in an airstrike on your house if you don't tell me what I want to know.
You see it?
You're looking at it?
Your loved ones are in there right now?
I can just do it.
Yeah, all the Call of Duty fans are like, see?
They should do this in every movie.
Do this in every engagement.
They would actually, the movies would end a lot faster if you could just do this.
We should mention this is all because Josh Brolin suspects he allowed a ship to leave that he would have otherwise maybe attacked as a Somali pirate and taken over, whatever, because that ship got through and these terrorists got to Mexico via ship.
It's his fault.
Yeah, the guy is a Somali pirate who attacks, I guess, every single ship.
Like, there's no ship left unscathed by this guy except for one.
And that's definitely how the guy that blew himself up at Border Patrol got to Mexico in the first place.
So he's asking, he's demanding that the guy tell him who paid him not to attack that specific ship.
Yeah.
I'm a Somali pirate, dude.
I've, like, murdered people's families in front of them, too.
Like, what are you talking about?
Step your game up, bro.
He goes, this is a bluff.
So he's talking about the airstrike.
He's like, this is a bluff.
You're American.
You have too many rules.
And again, yeah, the divorced dads are like, yeah, that's right!
This guy gets it?
Why can't our fucking politicians?
And Josh Brolin says no rules today, just orders.
And then he drone strikes the guy's fucking house with his brother inside.
And then you're like, oh man, that's fucking gnarly.
That's crazy.
He actually did it.
And then he switches the feed to now we're watching an SUV travel down the highway.
And he says, your brother's too big.
Or sorry, your family's too big.
Khalid or whatever his name is.
Your family's too big.
I can do this all day.
Like the real Captain America, essentially.
Yes, absolutely.
And so then I guess, you know, he tells him the information he wants to know, which is, of course, it was one of the cartels, the Reyes cartel specifically, I believe, who wanted this, you know, Muslim terrorist to enter the United States, you know, across the United States border.
And we cut to a sort of debriefing scene between Josh Brolin, the Secretary of Defense, some generals, where they're explaining how the President of the United States, well he says like, What's the definition of terrorism, Josh Brolin?
And Josh is like, whatever you want it to be, sir.
I'll fucking kill whoever you want me to.
It's the use of violence to achieve political means, right?
Just meaningless, right?
And then they say that the president is going to announce that the cartels are now on the terror watch list, which will expand, like, the ability to, quote, combat the cartels, you know, for the CIA, for the FBI or whoever, right?
The CIA in this case.
And the idea is that the cartels did this in the first place to tighten the borders because tight borders are good for business.
Yep.
Remember what happened to the price of cocaine after 9-11?
That's what he says.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, I can't make sense of, like, what?
They want to prevent themselves from being able to transport people and drugs?
Yeah, so the fraction that gets across is worth a little more.
I like how they're like, the problem is it actually takes more labor to get your cocaine now.
And you know, we gotta pay for the labor.
Yeah.
That's why your cocaine's so expensive.
Yeah, and it's just the idea that the borders aren't already tight.
You know, like, I don't know, whatever.
We already treat the border like a fucking DMZ, you know?
It's already like a kill zone, essentially.
But he goes, so what's the most valuable, you know, one of the generals or the Secretary of Defense says, what's the most valuable commodity the cartels move across the border?
And Josh Brolin, of course, he knows his shit.
So instead of saying like, you know, coke or grass, man, he says people.
And everybody in the audience is like, I fucking knew it.
I suspected that.
There's a migrant caravan.
It's coming up.
They're financing it.
Josh Bolin's like, there's this website where where people can actually get paid for access to their nudes and so now we the the price of people coming in to make it's it's because of the it's because of the sex workers we got it it's the the they're all the cartel yeah we got to stop it folks chatterbait that's the reason we got to secure the border So yeah, next week the president is adding the cartels to the terrorism list.
This allows us much more freedom in how we deal with them and like all these old generals are like winking and salivating at Josh Brolin.
He's like, you know, more torture, buddy.
You know what we mean?
And then they say, I think it's Josh Brolin who says, oh, the cartels are relatively stable.
No, one of the generals says, yeah, the cartels are relatively stable, but it's easier to strike when they're already fighting each other.
We learned this in Iraq.
Can you do with the cartels what you did in Iraq?
Saying it out loud?
Hey, you know what you did in Iraq.
But, like, did that work?
Like, I know, you know, the actual motives for entering Iraq, you know, there's a lot of things going on there, and whether or not they achieved those goals, whether stated or unstated, is up for debate, but I don't think Iraq was necessarily a win for, like, American foreign policy.
Let me ask you a question.
Do you remember where you were at on 9-11 too?
Yeah.
Oh yeah.
It never happened.
It never happened.
9-11-2 never happened.
Alright?
So it did work.
It absolutely fucking worked.
You can't argue with that.
I don't remember them ever blowing up the Twin Towers again.
They didn't do that.
They did not.
So therefore, it's a win.
Coming next year from the creator of Sicario, 9-11-2 Day of the Soldado.
See, the terrorists have to do a plot to, like, blow up just the middle of the Freedom Tower to recreate what...
And then fly planes into the... That's actually why George Bush has been getting into painting.
He has to be thinking more outside the box for his attacks now.
He has to be more of an artist about it.
And so this is like, this is the part where the politics of this movie become somewhat incomprehensible.
Because yeah, this is it.
Can you do with the cartels what you did in Iraq?
And it's like, oh, you mean kill like a million people for a policy failure?
Is that what you're talking about?
And then, but Josh Brolin is like, Hmm, yeah, I could do that, you know, and then he says, Well, you don't want to kill a leader.
Because you'll have 50 cartels pop up in its place.
You want to start a war.
If you want to start a war, you don't kill a king.
Killing a king ends wars.
And then... Yeah.
He says he's all... What is Reyes?
What is...
You know, how many kids does he have?
Or what's the age of the youngest kid?
And they're like, oh, 16.
And he goes, okay, you want to start a war, kidnap a prince, let the king start the war for us.
And this is like, once again, totally incomprehensible because it's like, okay, the whole point when you're saying start a war, you mean starting a war to make the cartels vulnerable, right?
It's like, wouldn't killing the guy in charge make them also vulnerable?
You're not talking about stopping the cartels, you're talking about fucking with them.
And wasn't the point of the first movie to consolidate power towards one?
Like, shouldn't you be able to use that cartel in some degree as a weapon?
Yeah, the reason the cartels are stable is because of the actions of the first movie.
Right, right, right.
But they're also talking about how we just want to stir things up a little bit, right?
And we don't want to end the war, because if we wanted to end the war, we would kill the king, even though it might, like, you know, chop a head off and create 50 heads.
Yeah, but it wouldn't end the war.
He, like, contradicts himself immediately, so it's so... But he's saying if we were to do it, he would either spawn off to a bunch, or it would end it, and we don't want to end it, which is kind of funny that they're saying that out loud.
They're saying we don't want to end it because the cartels are also good for business.
Yeah, I suppose, but it's like, what do you mean by striking the cartels?
Like, the whole point of this is, well, we want to fight the cartel.
We're getting more freedom to fight the cartels.
And it's like, what do you mean by that?
Because if all you want to do is, like, create chaos within them so that you can strike them, you still haven't said what you mean by striking them.
Yeah, so Josh Brolin gets all these, you know, he gets his plan.
He's going to kidnap the kid of the Reyes cartel.
And so he meets with a private military contractor who demands like 10 million dollars a month, essentially.
He wants drones.
He wants, you know, armored personnel carriers.
He wants all this shit.
And it's like, OK, you know, 10 million a month.
NBD, whatever.
What's that?
Not a big deal.
Who cares?
No.
Nothing.
And then we get Benicio Del Toro's character, the introduction of Alejandro in this movie, who's outside of an apartment building, I guess, and there's like a bunch of security guys kind of like, you know, casually standing around and Benicio del Toro, he, you know, this is this guy's tier one operator.
He gets like a whiff of something wrong is in the air.
He smells something off.
So he goes down the alley of his own apartment building, climbs up the fire escape, pulls out his gun, and is about to enter through a window or a side door.
And there's a sticky note on the door that he reads that says, I'm sitting in your living room.
Don't fucking shoot me.
I think that was pretty funny.
That's pretty cool.
You can't shit a shitter, it's that whole thing.
It's like, you know, hey, you're dealing with your equivalent here.
Yeah, exactly.
They know each other so well.
By this time in the film we're also introduced to Miguel, this kid living along the border who starts to work with the cartels and that could have been your Emily Blunt conduit if we actually We haven't dealt with him in any meaningful way.
I feel like we don't.
I mean, we extremely do.
We extremely do get a payoff.
Yeah, he comes back at the end.
At the end, when he's trying to be a badass at the food court.
It was so underwhelming for me.
Yeah, we're like, maybe we need to make another movie.
That's all that really happened.
No, exactly.
You were making the movie and you did nothing with it.
Yeah, yeah.
His character is kind of like, um, it's kind of like one of those breaking bad cold opens, you know, for like throughout one season, they'll like, you know, have an out of context cold open of like, oh, it's a kid playing in the desert and like they'll repeat that That's powerful.
That's a powerful thing to have.
the series until it finally shows you like what hat why we're looking at that kid that's kind of like what this is but the kid does have a little more agency yeah he's like he's got like dual citizenship he's like an american kid who or like who lives in mexico but goes to an american school something like that powerful that's a powerful thing to have imagine having dual citizenship uh the first time we see him uh he doesn't get on the bus and instead gets picked up by his older cousin
uh in like a trans am uh who takes him and under his wing essentially to you know become a coyote he He wants him because he's got dual citizenship, he's got a passport, that sort of thing.
And yeah, he flits in throughout the movie, you kind of see him like learning more about the coyote smuggling business, but it's just, you know, a little boring, not a lot going on there.
Until the end, like you said, Tony.
Back to C.I.A.
Agent Matt and Benicio Del Toro's Alejandro.
Matt is sitting in his living room and he says, you know, I'm, I need you again, Alejandro, you know, you ready to get back in it?
And he's like, no rules this time.
I'm turning you loose.
It's like, no rules.
We couldn't get Emily Blunt to sign back on.
Emily Blunt couldn't come back on.
So there's no rules this time.
What rules?
Like you, you were only allowed to kill two kids a mission and now as many kids as you want, baby.
Like, I don't know.
Yeah.
You know, on We Ate Movies, we just covered Delta Farce for our 600th episode.
I feel like this movie has a bit in common where it's just these American cowboys, for lack of a better word, just, we're going down to Mexico and we're fucking shit up!
You know?
That's literally, like, the extent of their mission in the first movie, is just to create chaos.
Right.
So they can install, yeah, somebody they like at the top or whatever.
CIA agent Josh Brolin lays out, like, you know, what he wants them to do.
He says, Carlos Reyes, it's your chance to get even for your family.
And so, yeah, the first movie, Benicio del Toro, his family was killed by the cartels, like, fucking drowned in acid, heads cut off, like that sort of thing.
Like, super killed.
Yeah, they're double dead.
But not like terrorist level by the cartel, because the cartels weren't terrorists yet, so it wasn't like terrorist level killings.
Just really ruthless killings.
It's definitely better to have your head cut off or be put in acid than it is to be blown up at the market.
By someone you're looking at.
Uh, and so yeah, you're gonna help us start a war.
With who?
Everyone.
And that's how, like, the majority of these scenes end.
With, like, an ominous punchy line.
Like, everyone.
It's like, wait, really?
Everyone?
It's like, no, I didn't really mean everyone, but like...
Everyone.
We're going to war with Germany and France.
One of my favorite Jay-Z lines is when he says, I'm trying to murder everything moving.
I love that line.
It's like, that's, that's fucking gnarly.
Yeah.
Uh, so we, we see how this, this, uh, mission is expressed.
We see what happens when Alejandro gets turned loose, uh, which is he basically, uh, not even basically he does kill, uh, the top lawyer for the, uh, Matamoros cartel, the rival cartel, the cartel rival to the Reyes cartel, and essentially trying to frame, uh, the Reyes cartel for the murder.
They do it on the street so it's sloppy, so it looks like a cartel thing.
And this is where Benicio del Toro does the finger thing with the gun, which is like, I think is the best part of the film is just seeing him just shoot this gun a ton of times by wiggling that finger.
Yeah, it was in the trailer.
It's a thing they do a lot in this movie where a lot of the firing of the guns, the way the operators move, there's not a lot of finesse.
There's a lot of brute stuff to make it seem more real and I like that.
That scene right there.
He doesn't look like John Wick shooting that gun there.
He just looks like a guy shooting a gun in a gnarly fashion.
I do like that stuff on this movie.
Yeah, he makes the lawyer put his glasses back on so he can see who he is before he kills him.
It's an effective violent scene.
Then we cut to a Catholic school, I'm guessing, in Mexico.
Where we meet Isabel Reyes, who is the daughter, I guess she's the 16-year-old that we're referencing.
She looks a little younger than that, but she's the prince that they're referencing kidnapping.
The daughter of the head of the Reyes cartel.
She's in a schoolyard brawl with another girl who she beats the shit out of and it's pretty well shot.
It looks real.
She knows how to throw a punch.
She knows how to ground and pound this girl.
I like this character a lot.
Yeah, yeah.
And I like that she beat up that girl because, like, they do a thing where the girl, the other... She's in a rich school and she's a rich girl, obviously.
She's, you know, her dad's the head of the cartel and everything.
But, like, she's also, like, rugged.
And, like, you can tell the other girl's kind of supposed to be a brat.
Mm-hmm.
Like, the other girl's supposed to be, like, a snotty little, like, light-skinned brat.
And she's like, yeah, fuck that.
I beat the shit out of her.
Like, don't talk about me.
Don't talk shit.
Yeah, they get called into the office, obviously, where they're in front of, I don't know, the head priest, the head child molester at this school.
Top ones.
It's played by the dude who played the Swede in Hell on Wheels.
If you guys talked about Yellowstone, you might want to talk about Hell on Wheels at some point.
The only reason I even remember that show is because of the few times you've mentioned it in passing.
I know that that's a cult favorite among very few people.
Oh, very few people.
A lot of dads that fell asleep in the afternoon that left the television on.
Yeah, that show is something.
And it's got a complicated main character.
Anson Mount plays Bo Hannon, who is a confederate on the run.
And the show that instantly keeps on trying to adjust that whole, well, he's not that kind of confederate.
We might have to, I don't know, we might have to cover that at some point, bring you back on to do that.
Oh yeah, I'd be happy to.
She gets called into the head of this school's office and he's like, what happened?
And she's like, oh, she, the other girl called me a narco whore and slapped me.
So I hit her.
What would you do?
Uh, and he's like, well, that's not your place.
And she's like, fine.
Then you beat the shit out of her.
Pretty good line.
Uh, he goes, I should, I should expel you.
I should expel you.
And she goes, do it.
Do it.
And he's just like staring at her like, fuck.
And she's very much like, oh, you just want, you want to fucking, you want to die, bro?
Yeah.
Go ahead.
Expel me.
Uh, yeah.
And then, uh, so she's leaving school in like a, you know, a motorcade of a couple SUVs, uh, and the, the security in the SUV, suddenly their cell service stops working, which is, I guess, uh, something that America can do to people, uh, on a way, like located within two cars.
Uh, and uh they yeah they kill all these well they don't kill them all actually they uh kill some of them and then leave uh and again this is Benicio del Toro like undercover wearing a mask pretending to be part of uh a different cartel this time uh leaves Two witnesses handcuffed to the car abducts the girl.
They black bag her.
They put headphones on her.
They then transport her to a Texas U.S.
armed military base in Corpus Christi, I think.
Woof, yeah.
She's now in Texas.
Yeah, so it's like they show up and some soldier's like, oh, we got you in building three, sir.
That's where we keep all the underage hostages.
It's like, OK, cool.
Also, remember how this whole thing is based around human trafficking and how human trafficking is bad and the human trafficking girl?
Yeah, totally.
Yeah, but it's for a good cause.
It's a good human traffic.
Yeah.
So yeah, then they put, after taking her to that, building they then plant her in a house in the middle of the desert she still doesn't know what's going on obviously she's she's been you know blindfolded and and uh she can't hear anything they put her in a house and then pretend to find her like as the u.s.
government.
They come back with the help of Texas police, by the way, who are like... So good.
So good.
They fake a breach of the door, like they count down and shoot their guns through the front window, and then they quote, you know, rescue her after they quote, clear the house or whatever, and take her into official U.S.
custody this time.
The real stuff.
The safe one.
From this point, they have to arrange how to, like, get her back into Mexico.
And this is where I got really confused.
They're talking with, like, the head of the Mexican Federal Police or the Mexican Army, you know, in this Texas food court.
And the idea, I think, is to put her in a holding cell Behind the rival cartel's territory.
So that Reyes' cartel, to retrieve her, would have to enter the opposing cartel's territory to get her, and then that's when, like, the war happens.
That's wow, because this really is like chess.
Wow.
That's amazing.
Yeah.
Is that how you guys read the situation?
Yeah.
It sounds about right.
I feel like this is... It gets muddled.
It gets a little confusing.
And honestly, this part... This is like the soggy middle of the movie.
It gets a little boring.
Totally, yeah.
This movie is two hours long.
I barely had the attention span for this one.
I had to re-watch part of it.
Yeah.
It does get a little...
Rough sometimes.
But I think the best part about this scene is then when they're leaving the mall...
They almost hit the kid with dual citizenship that we were talking about who was like walking you know through the parking lot and crossed in front of their cars and like he fucking mad dogs him he like eyeballs him when he's in front of their car he like hits the front of their hood and it's funny because this kid he does he's like unassuming like he he look he's brand new to the organization you know he but now he's done his like first trip or whatever so he's got a little bit of you know
edge under his belt or whatever and he like fucking slaps the hood of the car and stares at him and they're like and then i think josh brolin like pulls out a gun or something he's just like move and like not even pulls it on him but just like shows him like hey i've got a rifle here and the kid i'll shoot you kid and the kid walks off uh and uh benicio del toro says hey keep your fucking eyes peeled or something like that and so then they go
oh you can't even tell they're gangbangers anymore because the kid is wearing like a button-up shirt Because children, even U.S.
children, are now the enemy of the U.S.
Yeah, well, if they don't show proper respect to a car that almost ran them over, then they're probably a fucking gangbanger.
And at this point, the only thing gangbanger-y about him is his brown skin, right?
I think you're supposed to get the idea that because he eyeballed them that he's got like some sort of that he's done some work yeah or whatever but it's like the the statement you can't even tell they're gangbangers anymore is funny because don't worry by the end of this movie you'll be able to tell that he's a gangbanger when he's got fake tattoos all over his neck yep yeah because he looks like a regular like nothing looks hard about him at all he looks like a real basic teenager Basic jacket over a basic hoodie, nothing, nothing at all.
Skinny, regular haircut, nothing at all, but he's just like real intensely like looking at him and then, you know, lets it off, but yeah.
Nothing, only thing about him is he's, you know, he's, he's also very white passing, but he's just, you know, has some brown skin.
Uh, good actor.
I liked him in this movie too.
Yeah, yeah, he's really good.
So they're taking Isabel back, uh, to Mexico, right?
And they're gonna, I guess, take her, yeah, to this enemy cartel territory.
Uh, and she's like, she's intelligent enough to know that something's going on.
Like not just the fact that they're taking her to a bad spot, but she kind of suspects them of being involved in everything from the beginning.
They're being escorted by the Mexican military, and they have air support who's watching all sides, and it's like, oh, yeah, you're clear.
Like nobody's coming until the Mexican Humvee in front of them turns the turret around on them and fires into their Humvee.
They're double-crossed by the Mexican military, which, again, like who is this cartel supposed – like which cartel is doing this to them?
Bye.
Mm-hmm.
Because if it's the Reyes cartel, why would they be firing on the car that's holding their daughter?
If it's the, uh, the opposition cartel, wouldn't they want her- the daughter anyway?
Like- I think there's like- I think there's like a third character that is like just the cartel.
You know what I'm saying?
There's like a third part where it's like, oh no, that's just a cartel-y cartel.
It's not specifically one in particular.
We're calling it Kleenex, but it's just a tissue of a cartel.
That's just how they are.
They're animals down there.
You never know.
Yeah, exactly.
And so they actually lose Isabel in this.
They're able to kill all the other Mexican police.
They just gun them all down.
But Isabel gets away during the firefight, runs off into the desert.
They're about to leave and they notice she's gone.
So Josh Brolin has Benicio del Toro track her down and then they're going to meet up again later because there's more police incoming.
So... They're coming.
They're on their way.
They're three clicks away.
Yeah.
Do you guys know what a click is?
It's a mile.
Is it a mile?
Judging by this movie, it's because they say five miles and then they say five clicks right after it.
Yeah, but then they're three clicks.
Yeah, so I don't know.
I never knew if that was a thing.
Because I hear clicks in Operator movies.
There are Operator Operators in this.
They operate hard.
When I hear clicks, I never know.
When I hear clicks, I just think they have a nice pen they can use.
Benicio del Toro tracks down Isabel as she's being abducted again by a different guy.
Just kills the guy right next to her.
Convinces her to get into the truck with him.
And she's like, she voices her suspicions to him that he was the one who kidnapped her and learns that he is an enemy of her father's, of Reyes.
Because Reyes, I don't know if we said it, Reyes was the cartel that had his family killed.
Which is weird because who does he kill at the end of Sicario?
Like I thought that was the head of the cartel who ordered his family to be killed.
Who knows?
I think, no, I think it was the guy that killed him.
I think it was like, The guy who commanded the... Yeah, it wasn't exactly the guy, yeah.
Okay, so she has to like reckon with the fact that he's an enemy of her father's.
Cut back to America, cut back to, you know, headquarters for the CIA or wherever they're stationed, I guess in Texas again, where Catherine, what's her name?
Catherine?
Catherine Keener.
Keener, who is like Josh Brolin's handler.
She's like, You know, undersecretary to the Secretary of Defense or something like that.
She's the go-between for them.
She's telling him that, oh, we can't do this anymore.
POTUS doesn't have the stomach for this.
He's shutting us down because of the kerfuffle that happened between America and the Mexican police.
Oh, you sit that fucker down and explain how it works.
Yeah, no, he says he doesn't say fucker.
He says coward.
He says, you sit that coward down and tell him this is how we win.
Yeah.
And she says, you think he's concerned about winning?
He only, he's only concerned about not being impeached.
Yep.
Yep.
And so this, this again is profoundly confusing because since when does Josh Brolin's character care about winning?
Like his whole existence is like, I don't know, just a tool unleashed, you know, a happy violent tool unleashed by the U.S.
government to do whatever the fuck they wanted to do, and maybe there's like a vague gesture at keeping control over the chaos, like keeping control over the bad elements.
We're not actually interested in routing out those bad elements or solving those problems or whatever, we're just interested in like Controlling the flow of chaos or controlling the flow of these, you know, very valuable enterprises So it's very weird that he's like, oh This is how we win.
God damn it.
You sit that Kenyan motherfucker down and you explain to him Yelling his big-ass ears.
This is how we win And then she says, you know, he's only concerned about not getting impeached, you know, he's a coward politician And then he says, you know what?
This is why nothing ever changes And she says, you think change is the goal?
You've been doing this too long to believe that.
Yeah, we used to have hope, well is it hope, change, and jobs?
Yeah, hey, so much for change, right everybody?
Yeah, forget it.
I love that too.
It's like this guy is now our main character and also our moral center where it's like revealed that, oh, he's not doing all of this violence to serve like the interests of the powerful people in America and the most powerful country on earth.
He's doing it to like affect change.
He's doing it to like win the war on blank.
Right?
And it's very weird that they wrote that into his character because now like, yeah, every divorced dad in the audience respects him less for that.
A little bit.
They should make Sicario 3 and it's Josh Brolin killing Epstein.
Oh, I would watch that.
I would definitely watch.
I wouldn't even make fun of it on this show.
It would be great.
We would just revere it on the show.
But it's like, yeah, oh, this is why nothing ever changes, because we can't do a full-scale black, like, dark war within the cartels to, like, fuck with them amongst each other.
So...
Now we have Benicio del Toro trying to get to the border where he has like a beacon that he's going to activate so that Josh Brolin can meet with him.
And he's, you know, he's walking with Isabel, you know, through the desert.
They come across this kind of rundown house and a deaf man.
It's the sign language ranch.
Which is one of my favorite moments because at this point like yeah we find out he's a deaf man and Benicio del Toro knows sign language and can communicate with him and and like the guy's stressed and the guy's like fuck off like and Benicio del Toro just goes we're not mafioso and that's enough for him to go okay all right I guess you're not mafioso well okay sure.
He's a good guy with a gun.
Why hey why don't mafioso people just say they're not mafioso?
Have they thought about doing that?
Dude, don't give them any ideas.
Yeah, because we all know the one rule of engagement we do not do, the one thing you do not do is you can't play psych.
You can't do psych.
You can't go, I surrender.
Psych!
That's the one rule you don't fuck around with.
You can kill kids.
You can't do psych.
Yeah, if you're mafioso, you have to tell me.
That's the code of the mafios.
Uh, and then, so yeah, he's doing sign language to this guy, and it's like, oh, okay, wow, this is like, you know, like, oh, he knows Farsi, he knows Spanish, he knows English, uh, of course he knows sign language, because he's this, you know, elite CIA-trained operator.
We come to find, like, oh, my daughter knew sign language, or my daughter was, or whatever.
Deaf, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
So we know she's dead, which is cool.
You know it's cool though because like I used to know a little bit of sign language.
I used to live with some people who spoke sign language.
I knew my ASL pretty good and it's been a long time and I don't know it anymore and you know his daughter died a long time ago and he kept it up and I think that's really cool.
Yeah.
I think that's really good.
Um yeah so yeah the guy so I was thinking just oh he knows it because he's this like best of the best knows everything knows 17 languages uh like Pete Buttigieg you know uh and He, but when the deaf guy asks him, how do you know sign language?
Immediately, I was like, oh, his dead daughter is deaf.
That's got, that's going to be what it is.
Yeah.
We've got to humanize him in this movie now because he's one of the main characters.
And yeah, he says, my daughter.
And he says, oh, your daughter's deaf.
And he goes, was.
The guy's like, oh, there's a cure for deafness?
Sick.
Like, can you tell me?
Please tell me.
Cochlear implant?
That's cool.
I know it's pretty subversive within the community.
It's interesting you went that path.
How's that treating you?
Like, that's the conversation I would have gotten.
No, no, sorry.
What I mean is she's sealed in a barrel of acid.
Yeah.
Oh, well, then she's still deaf then.
No, actually, everyone can hear in heaven.
Yeah, Jesus gives you your ears.
You get the pearly gates, St.
Peter's gives you your wings and then Jesus gives you your ears or whatever else you've been missing.
Yeah, you're complete there.
My foreskin is waiting for me, I'll just be on the gates.
That's right, they got little curtains of foreskins and St.
Peter picks down yours and they regraph it on you.
It's during the same procedure they give you the white robe.
I don't know if I told you about my near-death experience, but I gotta tell you, when I came back, I was grateful, because it turns out mine was a little too tight.
It would have been inconvenient.
So, thanks, Mom.
People don't think their mom's enough for circumcising.
I found out what it was going to feel like, and it turns out mine was a little too tight.
Yeah, anytime you get a little hot under the collar, you pull your foreskin like it's your shirt collar.
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah so uh they're they're they're shacking up with this guy you know he the the deaf guy you know sorry I don't oh no Angel was his name yeah so Angel uh he he recognizes Isabel as you know the kidnapped daughter you know she's been all over the news uh and he and Benicio del Toro's like help me help her you know we're gonna get her to to a good place America uh and he's like okay yeah you guys can stay
Cut to another meeting at CIA Texas, where the Secretary of Defense is on a Zoom-type call with Josh Brolin, Catherine Keener, and essentially says, since everything's gotten so out of control, they no longer have possession of Isabel Reyes.
Josh Brolin's like, we're gonna get her back, don't worry, my guy is on it.
Secretary of Defense essentially just says, nope, you gotta kill that kid.
Yeah, gots to go.
She's gotta go.
She knows too much.
Yeah, I mean that's definitely something that the Secretary of Defense would hint at somebody who's paid much less than he is to actually give that order to Josh Brolin.
Just get her hospitalized and then we'll bomb the hospital.
Yeah, that's the way to go.
Listen, I got an even easier solution.
You got a coconut lying around?
Just bonk her in the head.
Forget everything.
She won't even know who she is.
Now you gotta drag her underneath the tree.
You gotta drag her under the coconut tree, but you gotta make it look like an accident.
And so, yeah, Catherine Keener is like, yeah, okay, well, you gotta do it.
You gotta kill that kid.
You gotta kill Benicio Del Toro.
Wipe it clean.
And Josh Brolin's like, do you know how hard he was to make?
Yeah, yeah.
Which is a very interesting line to me because it's like obviously he's like CIA trained and that sort of thing so he was made that way, but then she says, oh, a grieving father?
Yeah, throw a rock and I could hit about a hundred of those in Mexico.
So, does that imply that they are the ones who killed his family in order to make him, like, a weapon that they could wield, you know, in revenge for his family?
I thought that that's the way it was gonna go.
Like, Josh Brolin had done this to get, you know, Benicio Del Toro on their side, but I don't know.
I mean, that wouldn't be that wild.
They're doing that right now.
They're in the process of doing exactly that.
And he's not even a cartel guy.
He's just talented.
And also, like a god?
No, he's a god, right?
Because he comes back from the dead.
I think he's a god.
Yeah, at the end of this movie, he gets shot in the fucking head and survives.
At the end of this movie, he looks like that scene from Pineapple Express.
Where he has like the neck brace on, he's bleeding from the face.
It's like the same exact makeup and everything.
It's wild.
Man, could you just kill a character?
Could you commit to something in your fucking movie?
No, we gotta have Sicario 3.
Yeah.
He's like arguing with her.
He doesn't, he doesn't want to do this.
You know how hard he was to make or whatever?
And she's like, you can get another one.
It's fine.
And he's like, he's like, no, you know this, what the, what the hell's going on?
And she says, we ID'd the other bombers.
So the Kansas City target bombers, we ID'd the other bombers.
They're US citizens.
They're from New Jersey.
Yeah.
And Josh Brolin says, that doesn't change anything.
And she goes, it changes the fucking narrative.
And it's like, how are they looking at that as a bad thing?
Oh no, we found actual terrorists within American borders who are American citizens.
Oh no, guess we're going to have to spend even more money on domestic surveillance and whatever has replaced the Patriot Act in the last five years.
But that would have helped drive the plot in Sicario 1.
It doesn't help the plot in Sicario 2.
Yeah, it's just funny that Josh Brolin is like upset because he can't finish this mission or something.
And it's like, don't worry, there's gonna be a lot more work for you, dude.
Dude, we're gonna be able to literally execute people who kneel.
If you kneel for the play, we can just take him out right there.
That's right.
Take the shot.
No, you get to go, not only do you get to be on the sniper rifle, you get to watch the game.
You get to stay for the whole game after the anthem.
You just gotta pitch up there and wait for people to kneel.
Oh man, now that would be a true demonstration of America.
Like a reverse The Rookie.
Is it The Rookie?
Is that that movie?
Where the football player shoots people while he's running?
The Last Boy Scout, actually.
Yeah, The Last Boy Scout.
It's a reverse The Last Boy Scout.
Yeah, my god, that's a great scene where Billy Blanks runs down the field, pulls out a gun, shoots a whole bunch of defensive linemen, and then puts the gun to his own head and says, ain't life a bitch, and shoots himself in the head.
One of the hardest scenes of all time.
Probably the best movie opening of all time for a movie that is otherwise a little disappointing.
Oh yeah, well, you can't have that and expect the rest of it to be that good.
Exactly.
Yeah, that's the problem.
You put the best song at track number one.
Mm-hmm.
So Josh is like, okay, I gotta do this.
I gotta kill that kid.
I gotta kill that partner.
Yeah.
And he calls Benicio del Toro and he's like, hey, they're cutting ties.
You gotta take care of the kid.
She's a liability or whatever.
And Alejandro goes, not this one.
Not this one.
Which is very funny because yeah, he means not this kid.
Tell me to kill a different kid.
You got it.
Yeah.
Just not this one.
That's what I mean.
At this point you're supposed to kind of like...
He's supposed to have a moral compass here.
He's like, no, I can't do that.
Because before, he would have just turned off.
He would have just done it.
But now he's like, oh, no, not this one.
I see something in this one.
This one's worth saving.
This is like, can we keep him?
Yeah, yeah.
This is my new little toy here.
Please, let me keep this girl.
Yeah, he obviously sees her as a version of his daughter, or he sees his daughter in her.
So yeah, he can't kill her.
Much like conservative and reactionary political beliefs in general, other people's lives don't matter at all until they slightly remind you of your daughter.
That's why I had to storm that pizzeria and find out what was going on in the basement, is I thought someone like my daughter might be there.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I just got so mad.
I was just thinking about it all the time, about my daughter being down.
It's like, you don't have a daughter, do you?
No, I realized that the reason why she hasn't responded to my Facebook message is because she doesn't have reception in the basement of that pizzeria.
Exactly, this is why she... And that's why she hasn't gotten back to me.
Gotta rescue her!
Those three little dots?
Those are pepperonis.
Those three little dots you see?
Those are Morse code for pepperonis.
I've been sending myself Morse code for pepperoni way too often.
It's leading me down a disastrous path.
Wait, okay, so my notes kind of stop here.
I just realized.
Oh, that's fine, too.
I mean, nothing much happens in this fucking movie.
Jesus.
Okay, so Benicio del Toro now has to get to the border without the help of Josh Brolin.
He was originally going to try to meet up with him, but now, you know, that mission is off.
So he's got to actually use what?
Oh, a coyote.
He's got to actually go to the same organization that Miguel and his cousin work for, and he's told Isabel, you know, if anybody asks, like, tell them that you paid me to pose as your father.
We're gonna cut your hair so you don't look like Isabel.
Your name is Karina, I think.
They're waiting to get on the bus when Miguel recognizes Benicio Del Toro from seeing him in that mall parking lot, from mad-dogging him in that mall parking lot.
Which is like, and then I guess, you know, tells on him.
Yeah.
And this is also after he's made himself so apparent by offering $2,000 extra in cash so that they could go across together, despite he's already put a GPS tracker in her shoe.
I feel like he made himself stick out.
It's Del Toro's problem here.
He messed up.
Well, I think Miguel is the only problem that then he gets sort of ambushed on the bus.
They all pull guns on him.
He tries to convince them that he's working for the Reyes cartel because they recognize Isabel Reyes.
Uh, he's playing it cool.
You know, he looks really cool in this scene, Benicio del Toro, because he's totally calm as he has like three guns pointed at his head.
Uh, and he's telling him like, hey, you know, just do the right thing.
Uh, otherwise, uh, you and all your families are like gonna die, essentially.
Like if you do anything to fuck with this girl, Or if you fuck up this plan, like, it's not gonna be good, it's gonna start a war, like, just, you know, do the right thing.
Uh, the guy pretends like he's going along with them, the head coyote guy, uh, when they, like, knock him out from behind, put a sh- duct tape a shirt over his- over his head, and take him out to, like, a quarry, very 80s, like, very, like, 80s, uh, Tango and Cash style, uh, pit in the desert, and...
The head coyote guy tries to make one of the younger coyotes kill Benicio del Toro as part of an initiation.
That kid doesn't have the balls to do it, so the boss shoots him in the head and then gives the gun to Miguel to make Miguel be the one to kill him.
His cousin is like, no, he's just a boy, you know?
Maybe.
What was the other kid that just got shot?
He's a dead kid.
It doesn't matter.
His age does not matter anymore.
His age is now eternity.
He's a military-aged male.
We don't live in the past, bro.
I love that.
His age is now eternity.
I'm gonna think about that.
But Miguel's like, no, I'll do it.
That's fine.
I'm fine with this.
No problem.
And so, yeah, he goes up and he shoots Benicio del Toro in the head, like through the shirt.
You see the bullet enter his head.
Blood, the whole Magilla, you're convinced this character is dead.
He is super dead.
Well, we see him die.
Yeah.
I want to know, was this really Benicio Del Toro in the shirt mask for like the last 20 minutes of this movie?
Because he's like struggling with them a lot.
He's like trying to fight them off.
He's trying to get away when they shoot the other kid in the head.
It's a lot of acting to do when your face isn't even on screen.
I would have to give it to Benicio Del Toro if he's really like acting, if this is him in that scene.
Yeah, the kid shoots him in the head, and then they're like, yay, you did it!
You know, let's all go out for pizza.
And they all pile into the trucks and drive away.
Josh Brolin and company have been watching this thing from the air, and they know, like, which seat of which car Isabel is in.
And they're like, yeah, glad we didn't have to be the ones to kill Benicio del Toro.
Phew, you know?
It was really hard to make.
They follow the two cars and then eventually stop them.
And what is actually a really cool scene, because you're seeing real helicopters interact with real trucks.
I don't think any of this was CGI.
You see one of the helicopters swoop low in front of them and then turn to block the whole street and land on the street.
And it's a really cool shot.
It is.
No, what happened is, like, Miguel left the truck because he felt sad or weird about it just prior to this, so he doesn't enter the kill zone that's about to be created.
Yeah, he's in the back of the truck with all the other guys, and then he's like, man, fuck this, you guys aren't cool anymore.
It's like, what?
You just did, like, the worst thing.
Like, yeah, now you're suddenly, like, you wanted to do that, but I guess now, yeah, you don't, you feel some way about it or whatever, so he jumps out of the back while they're still moving, before the helicopters even show up.
Uh, and yeah, walks into the desert, which is what everybody does in this movie.
Uh, and yeah, and then they enter the kill zone, like you said, the killing fields, the, uh, the theater of war, this strip of highway.
And they kill everybody except for Isabel.
And Josh Brolin just like takes her and he's, and the other guy's like, uh, what are you doing, man?
Like, you're not, we're not supposed to be taking her.
And he's like, ah, fuck it.
Uh, she'll go into witness protection.
You're like, what?
What the fuck are you talking about?
Would that even apply?
Is there going to be a pending case against anyone involved in anything she has seen or done?
Yeah, what's going to happen is she's going to be in witness protection from the U.S.
government that she would be testifying against.
They talk about what a liability she is throughout the entire thing.
The entire thing is based on what a liability she is and he's just like, YOLO!
Yeah, suddenly I care now.
Suddenly I care.
And that's why he's the protagonist of this movie, is suddenly there's one kid that he doesn't want to kill.
I don't understand.
Because she's a good actress, you know?
You know, if this were like, I don't know, the daughter from like Californication or like some other annoying child actor that's way too precocious and knows way too much for an eight or ten year old girl, then sure, I would have killed her.
But this was actually a good, you know, sort of well-rounded, understated performance from a girl.
I couldn't kill her.
Yeah, I guess it's sort of like, we love our macho men that murder people indiscriminately, but we'd like to believe at the end of the day they would do the right thing.
Yeah.
That's all you have to do is you just introduce a little girl and suddenly it's like, oh no, suddenly doing anything and everything for quote freedom isn't as justifiable as you were frothing at the mouth about when you read the first movie the wrong way.
Yeah, so that's it for Josh Brolin, I guess.
Yeah, that's it.
That just kind of just stops there.
Yeah, it's kind of wild.
And this is where we get, it's almost, from now on it feels like a post-credits stinger type of thing of, uh-oh, Del Toro was alive and now he's on the ground moving around.
Yeah, a more bagged acting from Del Toro, I think.
It's him, yeah, waking up in the quarry pit, like lifting his head up and you get to watch like a bunch of goop fall out of his head.
Yeah, it's gnarly.
He does, if you've ever done warm-ups for jiu-jitsu or whatever, he shrimps across the pit to get to the other guy so that he can use the horn on his belt buckle to break the tape that's on his wrist, pulls off his bag, and yeah, I guess he got shot through the mouth?
Yeah, the cheek or something.
From the cheek out the mouth?
Yeah, both cheeks.
You know which is like that's that's cool i mean like that's like 50 cent like so i know it's real i know it's a real thing they should have been playing many men right here that would have been that would have been the heart i would have i would have totally i would have popped for that i you know what i thought this is once again like me thinking too hard about this movie but when i saw that he oh he actually just got shot in the mouth i was like oh okay sign language time But that doesn't happen.
At the end of the movie, one year later, he talks fine.
Yeah, you see him get into the car, but then it sags again because he just like loses consciousness and pulls off the road.
And you're like, okay.
And then he regains consciousness and continues driving.
You're like, okay, this movie is two hours long.
I guess they're striving for some realism there.
Well, he's actually prettier.
If it were a better movie it would have seemed like more of a moody scene where it's just like he's like desperate doesn't know if he's gonna make it but we're at like hour 53 at this point in the movie and it's just like okay let me see what he's doing what can he possibly do in the 14 minutes left in this movie And yeah, the answer is just a flash forward to Miguel, who now 100% quote, looks like a gangbanger.
You can tell.
He doesn't have to hit the hood of your car.
You wouldn't actually roll up on him.
You wouldn't do it.
Because you see him being a gangbanger.
He's got like tribal neck tattoos.
He's got like slicked back hair.
So many tattoos.
He got covered in that year.
Yeah, in just a year.
Yeah, that's pretty crazy.
Yeah, it's pretty impressive.
And now he's king of the food court!
It was all worth it.
To be cool at the mall, it was all worth it.
He can go anywhere he wants in this food court now.
Hell yeah, he's just like punking the security guard even worse than a normal teenager would.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, so he goes into like the back of the Mexican restaurant at the food court, which was like, I don't know, one of the connections for the Coyotes.
But look who's waiting for him there.
It's Alejandro Benicio del Toro's character.
It's a ghost.
It's a ghost.
Yeah, it's the ghost.
I'm shocked that didn't even come up.
Like, oh, you know, like, is he real?
Is this a...
He should have said, like, ghost in Spanish.
Yeah.
Isn't that, like, his name?
Or doesn't somebody call him that in the first movie?
Like, that's kind of his mystique.
I think you're right.
In the first movie, he's, like, hanging off the periphery.
He's a god, remember?
He's a god.
I mean, it's just like Christ, right?
Christ got, you know, shot in the face by the Romans.
Woke up.
And then got into a chariot and threw a grenade at some people.
But he's cooler because he's doing this like in his 40s, 50s.
Not like Christ's little punk ass.
He went out at 33.
Yeah, 33.
Young as hell.
Piece of shit.
I wish I was 33.
But yeah, so then yeah, he sees the ghost, and then he's just like, oh, so do you want to be part of Sicario?
Yeah, do you want to join the Sicario Cinematic Universe?
Have you heard of an organization called SHIELD?
That stands for Sicario.
Yeah.
No, he literally said, so you want to be a Sicario, huh?
Yeah.
And the kid's like, yeah, bro.
Yeah.
So easily.
I was like, let me tell you about your future.
Yeah.
That's the end of the movie.
Not a great movie.
It had its moments, but I mean, well shot.
I'll give it that.
I did enjoy the fake Hans Zimmer score.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I liked the score.
All in all, I probably would give it two out of five Sicarios.
Yeah.
Two out of five Sicarios?
Okay.
I would give it... I'm gonna give it three Sicarios because I think that there's a way that someone can make a 45 minute cut of this movie that would rule.
Possibly.
So I might do that.
Who knows?
Yeah.
I'm not gonna do that.
I'll give it one and a half Sicarios because they didn't do that.
Now, because I know they could have done that and I'm mad they didn't do it.
Yeah.
Okay, well, Eric, thank you so much for joining us here.
We loved having you.
Thank you for having me.
I'm a big fan of We Hate Movies.
It's a wonderful podcast that everybody should listen to.
Why don't you tell people about the show and where they can find it?
Oh, sure, yeah.
It's We Hate Movies.
You can find it anywhere podcasts are, whmpodcast.com.
We kind of just hang out and talk about movies, sort of like what we did here today.
And also, you know, I host that Hooked on T.J.
Hooker show, if you want more You know, if you want musings on fascist police violence, you can get it there.
TJHookerPodcast.com.
And follow me on Twitter at E-R-I-C-S-Z-Y-S-Z-K-A.
It is harder to spell than Sicario.
Yeah, I'm gonna come clean and say that I definitely typed your name phonetically into the doc today because I was like, I'm gonna fuck it up if I try to spell it correctly.
I know how to say it.
It's a tough one.
Yeah, well, thank you everybody for listening.
If you want more episodes of Minion Death Cult, you can support the show and get a bonus episode every single week at patreon.com slash MinionDeathCult.
I'm gonna, just a sincere request to help support the show this time because turns out I got charged $48 by the Daily Wire.
Because I forgot to cancel my 99 cent trial subscription.
Because, oh, I was like, what the fuck just happened?
I went to buy groceries the day before payday and I was like, okay, I'm probably gonna have to transfer some money from savings to buy groceries.
Let's see how much.
And I opened up my checking account and I only had $30 left in there because $48 went to the Daily Wire and I was like, what the fuck just happened?
I went to my Daily Wire account and it was like, yeah, you're on the $4.99 a month pass charged annually.
Fuck off.
So yeah, anything you can do to help support the show.
Just to like help mitigate, I don't know, the hurt feelings that that gave me.
It's super embarrassing that that happened.
The ciders are gonna cost more than the subscription to get over this.
So yeah, definitely the support there.
Yeah, it's like the Norm Macdonald dirty work thing.
You know what really hurts?
It's the lack of respect.
That's what really hurts.
Oh my god, that's terrible that that happened to you.
Folks, please, come on, support these guys on Patreon.
And I mean, I think now is the best time to do it because you both halves of our reading of Ladies First, a MAGA hat romance.
Are up now.
You won't even have to wait to hear the stunning finale.
Way, way more incredible.
Way more surprising than this movie, I would say.
You'll never guess how that movie actually ends.
That romance book was a fun one to do.
A lot of people enjoyed it.
And yeah, you can hear it at patreon.com slash MinionDeathCult.
Yeah, I got an anonymous review of those episodes saying I'm fully torqued.
Fully torqued for both episodes, so shout out.
Yeah, that's how good this stuff is.
It's totally worth it.
Also, just real quick, we gotta get going, but happy birthday to Tony Boswell.
Thank you, thank you.
If you're listening to this on Monday, it is Tony B's B-Day.
Happy birthday!
Thank you, thank you.
Again, what better gift than the gift you give yourself at patreon.com slash Minion Death.
Yes, absolutely.
Listen to me every day besides my birthday.
Yeah.
Okay, well that's the show.
Listen to We Hate Movies.
Thanks to Eric for coming on the show.
Listen to TJ, hooked on TJ Hooker as well, and we'll see you next time.
