A simple revenge story
that hides its hero.
At its core, Sicario is a very simple story. A man wants revenge on the cartel boss who murdered his family. We have seen this story a thousand times — from Frank Castle to countless revenge thrillers built on the same emotional engine. A good man loses everything, and what remains is not grief but purpose. Violence becomes the only language left.
If Sicario were told from Alejandro's point of view, it would follow a familiar arc. A lawyer in Juárez. A family destroyed. A descent into darkness. A transformation into something colder, more efficient, more dangerous. Eventually, a man becomes an assassin. It would be brutal. It might even be compelling. But it would also be predictable.
And Denis Villeneuve — working from Taylor Sheridan's screenplay — knows that.
So instead of telling that story directly, he hides it.
The Sonoran Desert. Dust floating in the air — always present, only visible when the light hits it. This is the film's central image. And its central metaphor.
Sicario (2015) · Dir. Denis Villeneuve · Scr. Taylor SheridanSicario (2015) · Dir. Denis Villeneuve · Scr. Taylor Sheridan · Starring Emily Blunt, Benicio Del Toro, Josh Brolin
Sicario is not about stopping evil. It is about managing it. And the only person who doesn't understand this at the start is the only person we are allowed to follow.
Taylor Sheridan —
the writer who started at forty.
Before we go further into the film, it is worth understanding where Sicario came from — because the screenplay itself is the argument.
Sheridan spent years as a working actor — appearing in Sons of Anarchy and Friday Night Lights — watching scripts get made and unmade, absorbing what didn't work. When he finally sat down to write, he had one advantage most debut writers don't: he was allergic to bad screenwriting. He knew exactly what to avoid.
Sicario was written on spec and placed in a drawer. He then wrote Hell or High Water, thinking it would be easier to sell. Both became Oscar-nominated films. The frontier trilogy — Sicario, Hell or High Water, Wind River — would establish him as the defining American screenwriter of the decade.
What makes Sheridan's approach distinctive is structural. He has spoken openly about Sicario's architecture: "Sicario is written on a five-act structure and a five-act structure within that. I leave the protagonist for twenty minutes at the climax of the movie to follow the villain." That line is worth sitting with. He calls Alejandro the villain. He calls Kate the protagonist. And yet structurally, the film belongs entirely to Alejandro.
That gap — between who the film calls the protagonist and who the film is actually about — is the engine of everything that follows.
Sheridan wrote Sicario on a five-act structure, with a five-act structure inside that. He leaves his own protagonist for twenty minutes at the film's climax — to follow the man he calls the villain.
Sheridan's Structural Architecture · The Screenplay as ArgumentA structural decision this bold is not formal experimentation — it is a philosophical claim about who this story belongs to.
The Story You Think
You're Watching
Most people walk away from Sicario thinking it is about an idealistic FBI agent slowly becoming disillusioned. And they are not wrong. Kate Macer is our entry point into the film. She represents law, process, and a belief that the world — no matter how violent — still operates within rules.
At the beginning of the film, she is competent, confident, and morally grounded. By the end, she is none of those things. She has been used as a legal instrument — her presence on the operation providing the jurisdictional cover that makes everything technically permissible — and she understands this only after the fact.
So yes. On the surface, Sicario is about her disillusionment. But that is not the real story.
She sees everything. She understands nothing — until it is too late. Her function in the film is to witness a world she has no framework for. She believes in borders: between countries, between law and crime, between right and wrong. The film is the systematic destruction of each one.
He barely speaks. He rarely explains himself. He feels distant, almost inhuman. But structurally, every operation, every decision, every lie told to Kate — all of it is designed to move one man closer to one destination. A house. A dinner table. A moment of revenge.
Alejandro is not the point-of-view character. But he is the engine. And that distinction is everything.
If we experienced the film through Alejandro's perspective, we would understand him too easily. We would feel his pain. We would justify his actions. We might even root for him. But Villeneuve doesn't want that.
There Are No
Clean Lines
Throughout the film, borders appear everywhere. The physical border between countries. Fences separating homes. Even casual references to games with defined boundaries — fair and foul, in and out. These lines are supposed to represent order. Control. Clarity.
But the deeper Kate goes, the more those lines dissolve. The CIA operates on US soil. Law enforcement works alongside cartel informants. Assassination replaces arrest. And the most unsettling realization of all: the United States is not separate from the violence it claims to fight. It mirrors it.
The convoy crosses from El Paso into Juárez. The border vanishes. The rules vanish with it. Kate is the only one surprised. She is surrounded by people for whom this line never existed.
The Border Crossing · Sicario (2015) · The Line That DissolvesVilleneuve films the border crossing like an invasion. Because it is. The only character who doesn't know this is the one we are watching through.
One of the film's most disturbing ideas is that the system and the enemy are not opposites. They are reflections. The cartels use fear, intimidation, and brutality. So does the system. The difference is presentation. Language. Justification.
Matt doesn't hide this. In fact, he embraces it. He doesn't want to eliminate the drug trade. He wants to control it. His goal — stated plainly once you earn the information — is not victory over the cartel. It is reduction. One cartel. One pipeline. One entity that can be managed. Chaos domesticated into order.
between controlling violence
and committing it?
The Ghost in
the System
Alejandro moves through the film like a ghost. He appears. He disappears. He acts without explanation. There are visual cues throughout — night vision, thermal imaging, figures glowing in the dark like specters — that reinforce this idea.
This is not accidental. The system operates the same way. Invisible. Unseen. Doing things the public will never know. Alejandro is not just a man. He is what the system becomes when it stops pretending to follow rules.
Night vision. Thermal bodies in the dark. The tunnel sequence strips the film of all colour, all clarity. It is the film's most honest image: the system operating in total darkness, lit only by its own instruments.
The Tunnel Sequence · Night Vision · Sicario (2015)The tunnel is not a set piece. It is an argument: this is what the system looks like from the inside, if you're allowed to see it at all.
Here is the real reason the film avoids Alejandro's perspective: he is already finished. Emotionally. Morally. Psychologically. He is not evolving. He is not questioning. He is not struggling. He is executing.
A story told entirely through him would have no tension. Because he already knows what he is going to do. And he has already accepted the cost. Kate, on the other hand, is still changing. She questions. She resists. She reacts. She feels the weight of every decision. That is where the tension comes from — not from whether the mission will succeed, but from what it will do to her.
The Dinner Table —
What the Film Was Always Building
Everything in the film leads to one moment. Not an arrest. Not a takedown. Not justice. A dinner table. Alejandro sits across from the man responsible for destroying his life. His wife. His daughter.
What follows is not heroic. It is not satisfying. It is not even framed as victory. It is cold. Methodical. Deliberate. He doesn't just kill the man. He forces him to feel what he felt — if only for a moment. This is not justice. This is vengeance, stripped of illusion.
A dining room in Juárez. A man sits with his family. Alejandro enters. The camera does not look away — and does not let this feel like what revenge films tell us it should feel like.
The Dinner Table · The Final Act · Sicario (2015)Sheridan and Villeneuve refuse to give the audience the catharsis the genre promises. This is not a fist-pump. It is a funeral.
Why Kate Doesn't Shoot
After it is done, Alejandro returns to Kate. Not as a hero. Not as an ally. He forces her to sign a statement declaring that everything that happened was by the book. This is the film's final transformation — not of Alejandro, but of Kate.
At one point, she raises a gun at him. She has every reason to pull the trigger. He threatens her. He manipulates her. He embodies everything she stands against. But she doesn't shoot. Not because she is weak. But because she understands something deeper. Shooting him doesn't change anything. The system remains. The structure remains. Another Alejandro will replace him.
And she signs the statement.
The horror of Sicario is not the violence. It is the realization that the violence is organized. Structured. Sanctioned. It is not chaos. It is controlled chaos. And the people controlling it know exactly what they are doing.
What Happens When Morality
Becomes a Disadvantage?
Sicario is not asking whether they will stop the cartel. It is asking something more uncomfortable: what happens when the system decides that moral restraint is a liability?
Kate represents moral restraint. Matt and Alejandro represent amoral effectiveness. And the film makes something brutally clear: the system does not reward restraint. It rewards results. Kate is not removed because she fails — she is sidelined because she cares. Her conscience is not an asset. It is a complication.
Sheridan has spoken about this without flinching. He isn't interested in the tired "War on Drugs is bad" argument. He is using the drug war as a backdrop to explore something larger: what institutional power does to the people inside it. What it requires. What it costs. What it turns them into.
Sicario is not about stopping evil. It is about managing it. And in a film about management, the most dangerous character is the one who still believes in something.
Matt. Alejandro. The cartels. The system. All of them operate by the same logic — power, efficiency, control. They differ only in their presentation. Their justifications. The language they use for the same violence.
Kate is the only person in this film who is not a wolf. And she is the only person who is forced to sign the paperwork. That is not incidental. That is the film's moral argument in a single image.
If Sicario were told from Alejandro's perspective, it would be a revenge story. By telling it through Kate, it becomes something else entirely — a story about what it feels like to witness a system that has decided vengeance is more efficient than justice.
Kate is who we follow. Alejandro is who the story is about. Sheridan separates these completely — and the gap between them is where all the film's tension lives. Ask yourself: whose story is this really? And is that the most interesting character to follow it through?
Sheridan abandons Kate for twenty minutes at the film's climax to follow Alejandro. This only works because he has spent ninety minutes making us feel Kate's disorientation. The structural gamble succeeds because the emotional groundwork is immaculate. You can break any rule — if you have built the necessary trust first.
Alejandro is not conflicted. He is not questioning. He is executing. If the film were his, there would be nothing to watch — because he already knows what he is going to do and has already paid the psychological cost. Choose your POV character based on who has the most left to lose.
Sicario never tells you the system is corrupt. It shows you Kate's increasingly small role in it. The film's thesis is not spoken — it is demonstrated through what Kate is allowed to do, what she is lied to about, and what she is ultimately forced to sign. Let your architecture make your argument.
Kate doesn't shoot Alejandro. She doesn't run. She signs the statement. Each of these refusals tells us more about who she is — and what the system has cost her — than any action she could take. The most honest characterisation often lives in the choice your character doesn't make.
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