With its references to ancient Jerusalem in the titles over the prologue - a spectacular FBI ram raid on a suburban house in an Arizona suburban cul de sac- Sicario is going for something mythic right from the outset.
Yes, this might be film of big black SUVs and kevlar vests and night vision raids and deja vu displays of US law enforcement inter-agency politics.
But Sicario emerges, less typical G-man thriller than something akin to Michael Mann's Heat or a Zero Dark Thirty substituting the War on Terror for the War on Drugs.
It's a big picture - helped by the wide-horizon cinematography of Roger Deakins and the deep-diving score by Johann Johannsson - wanting to describe a Big Picture. One about the cocaine trade flowing north through the Americas and how decades of that war have upped the ante on both sides.
Ultimately it falls short of any great insight about that. But it's still a riveting thriller led by the compelling performances of a flinty Emily Blunt as a FBI kidnap squad specialist and a never-better Benicio del Toro as Alejandro, a enigmatically shady character who is part of a covert operation headed by Josh Brolin into which Blunt is seconded.
