YMMV / Sicario

• Americans Hate Tingle: While the movie has received critical acclaim in America, it was criticized by the mayor of Ciudad Juarez himself as well as many of its citizens for its depiction of the city as crime-ridden and bleak, even calling for boycotts of the film. However, considering the movie was originally created in 2010 when the brutality of the cartel wars was Truth in Television, something even the mayor admitted, this can also be seen as making the movie an Unintentional Period Piece.
• Anvilicious: The filmmakers really really want you to understand that they despise the War on Drugs war. In their eagerness, however, they created a film with an outlandish plot: Apparently, the US government is on board with reviving the worst ever Medellin cartel, to be run by a CIA proxy warlord.
  • … But on the other hand, the United States government has a history of interfering with foreign governments, to the point of working with criminal elements, the only really outrageous thing is that anyone would be stupid enough to think it would work.
• Award Snub: Despite almost unanimous critical acclaim, the film only received three nominations at the Academy Awards (for Roger Deakins' cinematography, Jóhann Jóhannsson's score, and the Sound Editing). The performance by Benicio Del Toro was generally ignored, though he did manage to earn a BAFTA nomination.
• Awesome Music:
  • The Beast.
  • Also The Tunnel and Surveillance, parts of them being based on "The Beast".
• Base-Breaking Character: Kate. While everyone agrees Emily Blunt turns in a good performance, the character herself divides viewers. Some enjoy her as an Audience Surrogate amongst the morally grey characters that populate the film, showing how a normal person would react to such circumstances. Others tend to find her unbearably naive for a law enforcement official, with a Black-and-White Morality that makes little sense for an experienced officer to have.
• Do Not Do This Cool Thing: Alejandro and Matt are two of the smoothest operators this side of Modern Warfare, some proper bad enough dudes. And the film's message was supposed to be that all the cool guy shit they do is bad.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Steve, better known as "Glasses Guy" to the fans, was a huge hit with moviegoers thanks to Jeffrey Donovan's chilling performance, his snark, and his deceptively dorky looks masking a man with deadly precision, capable of gunning down a quartet of cartel assassins in less than three seconds during the famous border shootout scene. His return in the sequel was received positively by fans.
• Foe Yay Shipping: Alejandro/Kate has the most fanfics on AO3. Notably, Blunt had previously acted alongside Del Toro as his love interest in the 2010 film The Wolfman, meaning this effect might have arisen out of the actors' chemistry moreso than the script.
• Fountain of Memes: Whatever Alejandro says/does in the movie. To an extent, Matt.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The movie was already humorous to Marvel fans for having the Collector and Thanos working together, but it became even funnier when the Punisher appears in a minor role. Doubly funny because Bernthal gets tortured by the duo, which the Punisher often receives... or gives.
  • This film was a Lionsgate production, directed by Denis Villeneuve and starring Emily Blunt. Come 2017, Emily Blunt was in another Lionsgate production, which was released on the same day as another Villeneuve film.
  • People watching this movie and The Last Jedi might wonder if this means that Benicio del Toro is always untrustworthy.
  • Similarly, in this film, Emily Blunt is the Token Good Teammate with a villainous Hispanic compatriot. In the MLP Movie, she's the villainous teammate, with a nicer henchman played by another Hispanic actor.
• It Was His Sled: This isn't Kate's story; It's Alejandro's quest for revenge against the cartels.
• Jerkass Woobie: Alejandro is a killer with very little morals and, depending on your interpretation, crosses the Moral Event Horizon towards the end of the film. But his backstory ( He was once a lawyer whose wife was decapitated while his child was thrown into a vat of acid on the orders of a ruthless drug lord) can make him sympathetic. Even his theme seems to imply this.
• Magnificent Bastard:
  • Matt Graver is a mysterious, laid-back CIA "spook" who deals in combatting terrorism and the Mexican cartels through any means necessary. As seen in the first film, Graver brings FBI Agent Kate Macer into his squad, claiming to need her expertise but truthfully just using her as a liason to allow himself to operate on American soil, later having her life threatened to get her to sign the proper papers saying that everything he did was on the up-and-up. Graver works with Alejandro Gillick in tearing apart the Alarcón cartel, claiming that it is for moral reasons when in reality, Graver just wants Alarcon eliminated so his competition can take over and perhaps be easier to talk peace with. In the sequel, Graver concocts a brilliant scheme to kickstart a war between two cartels, failing only due to corrupt police, and, going up against his superiors and calling them out for their cowardice, Graver ends up massacring an entire cartel gang to rescue the endangered Isabel Reyes to honor the seemingly-dead Alejandro. Despite his initial friendly, seemingly care-free attitude, Graver is a stone cold bastard who engages in both physical and psychological torture, murder, and illegal operations abounding to secure his goals, accomplishing nearly all through a combination of manipulation and strategic genius.
  • Alejandro Gillick is a Sicario defined by tragedy and hatred, using his skills and connections to Graver to satiate his cold-blooded desire for revenge. Once a criminal lawyer, Alejandro's family was slaughtered by Fausto Alarcón, resulting in Alejandro becoming a gun-for-hire to seek vengeance, exhibiting remarkable skills in torture and murder that help his and Graver's schemes come to fruition. Hunting down Alarcón and killing his entire security force through pragmatic tricks and stealth, Alejandro calls out Alarcón for spending his nights eating dinner with his family, even while other families are killed on the drug lord's orders. Alejandro executes Alarcón's entire family in front of him before killing the man himself to seal his revenge. Capable of forming attachments to others despite his villainy, Alejandro considers Graver a friend of sorts, and grows to care for Kate Macer in the first film and Isabel Reyes in the second, at first showing a willingness to kill either one but ultimately sparing them, even putting his life on the line to rescue Isabel from death—getting himself shot in the face in the process, an event which doesn't even hinder Alejandro from killing a cartel group who threatens him.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Kate almost crosses it when she intended to kill Alejandro after forcing her to sign a document that said what Matt and he did was "by the book", but relents when she realizes that killing him in cold blood would make her no better than him.
  • On that note, if Alejandro didn't cross the horizon already before the events of Sicario, he definitely vaulted over it when he killed the wife and kids of Fausto Alarcon before killing him.
  • Matt also crosses it (if he hadn't done it already) when he reveals to Kate that the real goal of the operation is to exercise control over the cartels and that, to achieve said goal, he has not only manipulated her to give himself an excuse to operate on American ground, but has also willingly unleashed a sicario of the Medellin cartel with a personal vendetta (that would be Alejandro) to do the dirty work, which ends up getting a lot of people killed, including two children.
• One-Scene Wonder: Fausto Alarcon.
• Rooting for the Empire: Some fans actually support Matt and Alejandro's methods of battling the cartels, considering that the cartel thugs are mostly not portrayed in a sympathetic way at all and the film shows Matt and Alejandro's methods actually working. It also helps that seeing Delta Force battling cartel assassins looks really cool.
• Shocking Moments: Your jaw will drop at the very sudden sight of Alejandro killing Alarcon's wife and kids right in front of him before coldly finishing him off.
• Signature Scene: The border shootout and Alejandro gunning down Alarcon and his family are constantly referenced as prime examples of excellent tension-building in film.
• Spiritual Successor:
  • Arguably this to Traffic (2000). Both movies are about the War on Drugs, take place near the border, have multiple intersecting storylines, exist in a Crapsack World, end with no real resolution to the questions raised, have extensive bilingual dialogue and feature Benicio Del Toro.
  • Also to John le Carré's The Mission Song, in which a skilled but naïve protagonist is exploited by brutal and amoral people in the service of Realpolitik.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: Arguably the point of the film (it's something of an Author Tract about the War on Drugs), but the only outright good characters are Kate and Reggie, and Kate ends up pretty broken by the end.
• The Unreveal: it is pretty obvious from early on that Matt is a bad guy, and Alejandro is morally ambiguous at least, so a first time watcher my find themselves waiting for a twist that never comes.
• Unintentional Period Piece: The film was conceived during Ciudad Juarez's worst crime period in the early 2010s. As of the film's release in 2015, the city's crime rate is significantly lower. On the other hand, if you consider the movie as a representation of Mexico's overall problem with crime, then the crime rate overall has increased from 2010 to 2018.

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