Film: 'Sicario 2 - Soldado'

Sequel (in name, but little else) to 2015's 'Sicario', this latest film features two of the former's main actors, Josh Brolin and Benicio del Toro, while the major missing element this time is Emily Blunt who made a significant impact in the earlier, and there's not much additional feature here to compensate, though it's every bit as brutal.

Set around the Mexico-Texas border, as was the first film, it's a story involving rival Mexican drug cartels who smuggle Islamic terrorists, along with undocumented immigrants, over the border to commit acts of terror in the U.S.A., and the F.B.I.'s campaign to damage the Mexican gangs by driving them against each other through the kidnapping of the 16-year old daughter of one of the drug gang leaders in the guise of it being another gang who carried out the abduction. I got the general drift of the 'plot' but the details left me quite confused, not assisted by much mumbling, particularly from the morally ambivalent Brolin as the head of the on-the-ground campaign. Del Toro as the Spanish-speaking collaborator with America on the Mexican side of the border is as scarily efficient as he always is. There's also Catherine Keener who demonstrates that she can use the 'f-word' as forcefully as any man (So there!). I missed the appearances of Matthew Modine but he was in there somewhere.

The opening few minutes were shocking, plain and simple, though not in a graphically grisly sense - more in surprise. I jumped in my seat at least three times even though we could see the dread thing that was coming. Unfortunately, despite there being equally hard-hitting scenes in the main film itself, nothing gave me quite the same level of shocks. 
There are some gory moments with lots of killings nearly all through gunfire or grenades, but the pace is undermined by there also being at least two 'Oh really!' developments that took some swallowing. Oh, and the very final short scene left me perplexed, to say the least!

Director is Italian Stefano Sollima, pulling out all the stops and then some, with some aerial-shot sequences particularly impressive.
Taylor Sheridan is the writer, as he also was for the original 'Sicario'.

General verdict is that 'Sicario 2' is pretty good though not having the punch which the first one did, noticeably evidenced by the absence of an Emily Blunt character. I agree. I gave the 2015 film a rating of 6.5. This one.................5.5.

(IMDb..........7.4 / Rotten Tomatoes................6.3)