sicario

[IMDB] [Amazon]

sicario means hitman, in case you were wondering.  what i am wondering is if knowing that before i watched the movie would have made me like it less.  i appreciated the triple reveal at the climax, and i think it would have been a lot more obvious what was going on with that key piece of information.

so anyway.  i like most of the moving parts here--the acting and story were nice, and the camera work and visualizations did a great job of setting tone.  what i really want to object to is the portrayal of mexico as a bullet-ridden hellhole spilling over its borders.  i felt like i must be watching an nra ad or something.  i cannot decide whether they showed usia as a place which was just as violent because they wanted to show those means as necessary, or if it was intended as a comparison--the good guys are just as bad as the bad guys.  i like to believe that the comparison was intended because then the ending makes sense.

sicario gets three grotesque mutilations.

hitman: agent 47

[IMDB] [Amazon]

hitman movies are not what you would call high art.  i would usually tell you they are straightforward action movies, guns and explosions and stuff.  however, because i am bored, i would like to explore the hidden depth of hitman movies.

hitpersons are ostensibly not free-willed persons; they lack emotions like fear or happy and they take orders real good.  this is a metaphor for just about all of us, since it is a rare person who understands why they are here or what their purpose is.  humans agonize over this day in and day out.  hitpersons have it easy by comparison.  they do not have to worry about purpose--other people tell them what to do and who to kill.  no need to figure out what to do with their lives--they have been imprinted with all the skills they need to kill people.  think about how easy your life would be if you were already super elite at all the things you needed to be skilled at, plus somebody was telling you how to use those skills.  right?

except...maybe you would chafe a little at the lack of free will?  and perhaps question the morality of what you were doing?  and then, perhaps, you would let your target walk free, and they would make a movie about it, and they would call it hitperson: agent 47.

hitman: agent 47 gets two red ties.  did they do the metaphor on purpose?  only five minutes of research on teh internets can tell.