This October marks ten years since the US release of Denis Villeneuve’s neo-western thriller, Sicario. Taking place in multiple urban and rural locales along the US-Mexico border, this film explores the tragic realities of the cartel economy, state power, and their violent overflow into civilian life when these forces collide. Chaos is first showcased in the film’s opening scene, where we observe US agents raiding a suburban Arizona home housing associates of the film’s cartel antagonist, Fausto Alarcón. Gunfire ensues, and agents gain control over the premises only to then discover a morgue’s worth of migrant bodies wrapped in plastic, stashed within the structure’s cavernous drywall. An explosion then erupts, and a federal agent is added to the scene’s mounting death count.
There is no gentle on-ramp into Sicario’s violent dramatics. It is here where Villeneuve’s signature, suffocating tension takes hold, sustaining and driving the film’s momentum through its finale. In many ways, this scene’s striking rupture (physically with regard to the detonation; apocalyptic in its revelation of systematic murder) is exceptional: a dramatic instance of law enforcement and cable media flocking to fetishized violence, especially when it enters the realm of America’s suburban sprawl. And yet, as viewers placed within the paranoid uncertainty that haunts even the most unsuspecting neighborhoods, we’re also made to feel the omnipresence of violence as an expected reality. This dizzying fear is a central theme Sicario explores within both the ferocity of the drug cartels and the United States federal forces that have unknowingly (and knowingly) propped up these institutions even as they have sought to thwart them.
To draw a stark contrast, the movie’s most riveting set piece takes place in the sprawling city of Ciudad Juárez, where Mexican residents just across the border have a far more ubiquitous experience with violence than the Arizona suburbanites of the opening scene. As the film’s three central characters (FBI Agent Kate Macer, ex-military advisor Matt Graver, and the titular sicario (assassin) Alejandro) conduct a prisoner extraction through the heart of the city, they must first navigate a sea of city blocks lined with dilapidated buildings and decapitated bodies, dramatically hung upside down from overpasses. Our film’s protagonist, Kate Macer, exudes a look of shocked ignorance. More hardened agents explain how narco-terrorism serves as a public display of deterrence, reminding innocent passersby (and naive foreign agents) of what awaits them if they fail to comply with the cartel’s grasp on the community. In Ciudad Juárez, the dead bodies hang like strange fruit from concrete branches. Back in Arizona, murdered bodies see daylight when excavated. Nevertheless, one’s proximity to death is universal, regardless of how hidden the corpses are.
It is in Sicario’s depiction of a world so steeped in death where divergent understandings of justice emerge from our film’s three central figures. It is also where the theological import of Villeneuve’s project gains the most traction. The death-riddled world of Sicario is not a unique instance in either human or scriptural history. Global realities of genocide, economic exploitation, military expansion, and cruelty among bordering people groups haunt our 21st-century consciousness as much as our Judeo-Christian history. Our ways of rectifying the inequalities, impoverishment, and insidious deaths left in sin’s wake are our understandings of justice that seek to make right what has been bent toward wrongdoing. This reckoning takes place both within the convictions of an individual’s heart and at the systemic levels where individual hearts agglomerate, taking on a life force of their own. Christians must approach questions about justice in light of Jesus’ life, death on the cross, and bodily resurrection. Taking these Christological events seriously, one finds that when we talk about justice, one is most surely also speaking of salvation. The very reconciliation of God with humanity in the incarnated life of Jesus Christ is the same power that makes clear a path toward justice in a broken world. Ultimately, the questions we ask of justice are the same we ask of salvation: How can what is twisted away from God’s love be healed and made right once again? How do we live rightly in a world where “all things are being made new” while under the dominion of dark, destructive forces?
However, seemingly faithful approaches to the questions of justice beget contradictory answers, even among those who commonly exegete the cross and resurrection as primary sources for ethical consideration. The contextual landscape in which one incubates their theological observations becomes as monumental an influence on one’s rendering of justice as the Christological events being observed. A formational experience north of this porous, liminal border within the jurisdiction of a colonial power will inevitably shape a different understanding of Jesus’ life than one whose life was formed below the Rio Grande. And yet, all three characters’ perceptions of justice fail to amount to anything more than vapid utilitarianism, vengeance, and blind obedience to state power, ideas discordant with the life of Jesus Christ and yet deeply indebted to the setting of border politics. Let us now take a look at each of these renderings of justice, seeing how fitting them within Jesus’ life is an ultimately futile endeavor. A better story is needed to make sense of the violent destruction within our own.
Means-Justifying-Ends Utilitarianism
We first encounter Matt Graver in a nondescript conference room wearing a graphic T-shirt and flip flops, contrasting sharply with the sterilized business attire of his colleagues. There is a renegade quality about his character; his disruptive presence rattles the rigid, bureaucratic procedures that have failed his government thus far. Various global US interventions have instilled within him a sense of right and wrong derived from a commitment to stability among opposing forces, a development of justice that prioritizes a steady-state equilibrium as the optimal solution to foreign conflict. For Graver, ceding to the particular demands of antagonistic forces means abandoning the firmness of one’s moral principles, even if a veneer of nationalist exceptionalism is still needed to quell the anxieties of civilians back home. His idea of justice will feed us the moral reassurances we need to sleep at night, all while maintaining international “stability” through a series of negotiated settlements by any means necessary.
Steel-manning this perspective, one can appreciate Graver’s heightened sense of realism, his ability to index just how pervasive greed and unbridled self-interests threaten our world. This realism reveals a utilitarian bent to this mode of justice where the primary moral imperative is to minimize chaos, even if deception and controlled violence are sad but necessary requisites. Moreover, Graver sharply perceives the hollow moralism of procedural politics — where “following the rules” is heralded as just behavior regardless of how fruitless the results are. A scene in the film’s final act illuminates this intentionally compromised position Graver adopts. Having just heard of an unfamiliar term referring to the way things used to be, Kate asks Graver through bated breath, “What is Medellin?” In what amounts to the film’s most insightful critique of America’s drug-enforcement policy, Graver exclaims, “Medellin refers to a time when one group controlled every aspect of the drug trade, providing a measure of order that we could control. And until somebody finds a way to convince 20% of the population to stop snorting and smoking that shit, order’s the best we can hope for.”
There’s an intoxicating wisdom in accommodating one’s view of justice to a realistic assessment of “the best we can hope for.” It portends to take the most accurate view of the world. However, as people deeply influenced by and susceptible to a legion of self-serving biases, what often results from this model are negotiated periods of “peace” (or “lack-of-chaos”) that fail to be experienced by all parties, especially those who populate the underclasses of society. The acute pangs of violence and poverty still reverberate throughout communities who exist below the threshold of peaceful tension negotiated between state forces and cartel organizations.
Moreover, this position assumes a deeply cynical outlook of the world. It fails to capture the generative creativity that suffering communities can exhibit even in seemingly fatal conditions. Hope becomes a fantastical vision for the unsophisticated. Rigid, limited proposals for “peace” appear as the only viable options. When “order” becomes the ultimate goal of justice, human bodies are reduced to disposable obstacles; collateral fodder to justify a fatalistic telos. The sanctity of human life ebbs away over time in our collective consciousness, all under the guise of insisting this “is the best we can hope for.”
The gospel of Jesus Christ resists this movement insofar as it understands sacrificial love as a sturdier ethical platform than unfettered utilitarianism. Jesus Christ refused to negotiate with the chaos of his day to achieve a provisional equilibrium, refusing until his final breath to acknowledge the moral power of any kingdom other than his Father’s. This, of course, came at the cost of his own life, a cost that players in these diplomatic chess matches always pass down to parties more vulnerable than themselves, eschewing sacrifice for the sake of self-preservation. Jesus’ witness to his Father’s love is one that absorbs this vulnerability for the sake of his community (humanity) rather than seeing it trickle down to those our world have deemed disposable vessels of our violent tensions.
What Graver’s worldview fails to encapsulate are the creative powers at work when the Spirit breathes life into a community haunted by death. Cynicism locks the world into a stasis, seeing rigidity as wisdom and hope as folly. Resurrection transforms the stasis left in the wake of Jesus’ death and makes possible a new existence where hope is not only a tenable reality, but the surest means of truth in a world still shackled to violence.
Eye-for-an-Eye Retribution
Alejandro’s character is one of clandestine mystique. A man of few words, every action he takes is deliberate and sure. While serving alongside Kate and Graver to lure a US-based cartel leader back into Mexico, Alejandro’s identity as a sicario, a cartel assassin, becomes clear. In a collaboration of mutual interests, Graver secretly accommodates Alejandro’s mission into Mexico so both can achieve what they see as justice: for Graver, to restore the Medellin state of compromised equilibrium; for Alejandro, to avenge the slaughtering of his wife and daughter by Fausto Alarcón decades prior. Vengeance, and the desire to level justice’s cosmic scales through retributive acts of violence, is Alejandro’s singular focus. Near the film’s end when Alejandro enters the home of Fausto Alarcón, his actions are swift and clinical, murdering his wife and children with a lethal calmness. Only then does Alejandro kill the catalyst of his tortured past. The scales have been leveled: a child for a child, a wife for a wife. Although his words and expressions fail to betray his inner turmoil, this fulfillment of his sicario identity ultimately shapes the ruthless arc of his character.
At face value, Alejandro’s rendering of justice appears the easiest to diagnose, most fragile to defend, and least congruent to the person of Jesus Christ. From Hammurabi’s Code to recent social media posts concerning political assassinations, retribution remains for many the default method of satiating perceived injustices. There’s a neatness to its proposition, even an innate connection to our natural order. Newton proposed that every action necessarily has an equal and opposite reaction; Alejandro saw the blood of Alarcón as a necessary consequence to the blood his family shed.
The degree to which Alejandro believes in the thought-out logic of his actions isn’t revealed. Rather, his is a justice that speaks more deeply to his pathos, his yearning for healing the only way a sicario knows how. If Graver’s position can be seen as macro-analytical, tethering one’s self-interests to the expansive conditions of global affairs, Alejandro’s is intensely personal; he seeks to tame his inner chaos by pairing one murder with another.
Scripture is riddled with accounts that reflect the same reflexive violence that Alejandro perceives as justice. In the wake of Dinah’s vicious sexual assault in Genesis 34, her brothers Simeon and Levi attempt to atone for her pain by murdering an entire city’s worth of men. Moreover, in Luke 9 when Jesus and his friends are victims of a much lesser crime (the lack of hospitality from neighboring Samaritans), his provoked disciples ask, “Lord, do you want us to call fire down from heaven to destroy them?” And yet, even in cases where God seems to accommodate our human weakness through limited allowances of retribution (see the Noahic covenant in Genesis 9), we are continuously shown a God who opts for restraint over vengeance: refusing to strike down Cain for the murder of his brother, preserving the golden-calf-worshipping Hebrews, etc.
Jesus’ life was one that renounced the temptation to level the scales through revenge. However, this hasn’t stopped many from reading our instinctual proclivity for revenge into the justice that takes place on his cross. The wrath of this retributive God seeks, like Alejandro, to settle both individual debts and cosmic scores by means of bloodshed. Justice then becomes a game of settling accounts to appease the wrathful appetites of paganized deities and wounded hearts. And yet, justice as understood through Jesus’ nonviolent imperative seeks to dispel the myth that the world will be set right by shedding blood for blood: “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you: Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.” If Jesus is the fullest revelation of God, sharing in our human person, then what is true of Jesus’ rendering of justice in God’s Kingdom is further extended to God’s salvific reconciliation of humanity through Jesus on the cross.
Pledge-of-Allegiance Naivete
Much of Kate Macer’s story has already been told thus far, as hers is the thread that pierces through this film’s dramatic folds, entwining itself in the central themes that draw out Graver and Alejandro’s characters. Her journey is one marked by awakening: both to the pervasiveness of violence and the hollowness of our government as it fails to live up to the ideals it publicly exalts. There is an urgency to Kate’s understanding of the world that refuses to exist on the periphery of action. Where there is potential to expedite her country’s efforts to topple cartel hierarchy, she places herself in the middle of these events. When there are hidden motives at work — especially between Graver and Alejandro — she stubbornly pries out whatever information they are willing to disclose.
Even as she seeks to push the boundaries of when and what they are willing to accomplish, there is an implicit trust that Kate has in the systems that employ her. She displays an unexamined assuredness in the simplicity of her mission: (1) the cartel seeks to conduct violent business across the US-Mexico border, and (2) the way of curtailing said violence is to “take down” the cartel system, ushering those responsible for this mayhem through justice by trial. It’s notable that Alejandro and Graver don’t see abolishing the cartel as the ultimate end. Where these men see maintained order and individual vendettas as justice, Kate still adheres to an optimistic horizon where through proper craft and institutional fortitude, we can will ourselves toward a less violent future.
Her dream shatters as she realizes that the role her government plays in this geopolitical drama isn’t one of white knight. In the film’s penultimate scene (just after her revelation of Graver’s “Medellin” mission), a bruised and battered Kate is met by a shadowy Alejandro in her dismal apartment. He forces her at gunpoint to sign a form insisting that everything they accomplished was by the books. It is here where she must decide if her commitment to procedural justice is worth the cost of her life. She relents, signs the form, and just as Alejandro walks off through her parking lot, she draws a shakily held gun from her balcony. After a long showdown, Kate lowers the gun, and Alejandro wanders off into the darkness from which he came.
There is an appeal to the naivete Kate wakes up from. It creates neatly sanctioned heroes and villains. Through controlled blindness, this justice maps neatly onto a singular narrative that leaves no question about one’s allegiances. In a theological retelling, there are deep scriptural corollaries to this understanding of justice and salvation. In the great hopes that await their ultimate fulfillment beyond the eschaton, we rest assured that our present allegiance to God’s Kingdom will not only fail to morally betray us, but will ultimately find completion in God’s final restoration. But when this authority is substituted with the fickle promises made by government agencies formed within complicated webs of competing interests, our pledged allegiance fails to avoid moral compromise. Kate’s path was ultimately destined for disillusionment, and it can be tempting to see Alejandro and Graver’s nihilistic cynicism as Villeneuve’s proposed solution to her credulity. But his film resists this conclusion. Hope is found elsewhere, not within this endless cycle of ceded victories between warring powers. And it’s this hope, subtle as it may be, that we turn to now in Sicario’s final character worth exploring, Eliseo.
Communal Integrity as Resilience
Throughout Sicario we are privy to glimpses of Silvio’s life, a police officer living in northern Mexico. We witness the simple domesticity of his family waking up, eating breakfast, drinking coffee, and his persistent son, Eliseo, begging him to play soccer on his day off. Silvio’s fate in Sicario is a tragic one, as it is slowly revealed that he moonlights for the cartel as a drug runner. However, Silvio is never painted in an insidious light. He is the poor father of a poor family in a poor community, whose vices appear limited to sleeping in and a splash of liquor in his morning coffee. Entangled in enterprises that promise small payoffs for blood-loyal fidelity, Silvio ends up as one of Alejandro’s expendable victims as he marches toward the object of his vengeance.
And yet, the community that was once his own persists. The final scene Villeneuve leaves us with is of Eliseo playing soccer in his father’s absence. First, a shot of Eliseo taking inventory of his father’s empty bed, standing beside it hand over wrist as if honoring the coffin of the police hero he held him to be. Eliseo is then led to the town’s dusty soccer pitch by his recently widowed mother. He dribbles forward, approaching a netless goal laid against a backdrop of desert hills bisected by border walls. Suddenly, everyone freezes at the sound of distant gunshots. The firing subsides, and the camera pans back to Eliseo’s face, who then resumes play as if nothing had happened.
What we are left with is a community intensely awake to the reality of violence and yet not overcome by it. Life goes on, and soccer has to be played, even as beds once occupied by flawed but loving fathers now lie vacant. The slowly panning camera that once focused on Kate’s face as her trembling hand clutched her gun is paralleled by the film’s final shot capturing the youth of Eliseo on the soccer pitch. The difference is that Kate’s face holds the despair of one just recently awakened to the shallowness of her constructed reality; Eliseo’s holds a quiet resilience as he is surrounded by a community who intimately knows his pain.
Justice, then, as presented by Eliseo and his community, is the Kingdom of God surviving while resisting fatalism even in the midst of looming destruction. It’s the small acts of resilience through commitment to the health of the community that stand out so brilliantly against a dark backdrop of proximate violence. It’s the will that understands soccer as a worthwhile community venture even while surrounded by symbols of death’s encroaching power: muffled gunshots and border walls. It reminds us that the reconciliation present within Jesus’ death and resurrection is a community-forming reconciliation; a salvation of the individual soul necessarily tethered to the construction and welfare of a new mode of social being.
For many, the survival of one’s community in the face of intruding death is how realizable justice and salvation present themself. Drawing upon Nancy Pineda-Madrid’s work Suffering and Salvation in Ciudad Juárez, we’re invited to explore this relationship further. Both Pineda-Madrid and Sicario understand the US-Mexico border as a catalyst for international movement, movement whose friction ignites violence of all kinds. While incorporating the reality of cartel brutality into her analysis, her focus is primarily on feminicide, the systematic and ritualized killing of women across Ciudad Juárez. Decades of state complicity, capitalist exploitation, patriarchal norms, and the ubiquitous violence of the drug trade have created the social grounds on which these targeted yet seemingly random murders take place. As in Sicario, power-wielding parties in Ciudad Juárez resist altering structures that rigidly entrench their own power, even at the cost of the city’s most vulnerable women. Pineda-Madrid’s thick description of this moral travesty hangs heavy over her work. Even then, she locates hope in this ongoing story, one of creative communal resilience just as we see in the lives of Eliseo and his neighbors. Justice and salvation, for Pineda-Madrid, must mirror the realities of sin that we both emanate and encounter: “If sin is both individual and social, then so must be salvation” (10).
Enveloped by the social and individual nature of our sin, it’s within the movements of these communities that we glimpse our interconnectedness (and shared salvation) with our global human community. The degree to which we locate our shared humanity in the face of both the grieving yet resilient Eliseo (as well as the broken and bruised Kate) is the degree to which we recognize that our siloed lives do not exist independently from his. My life, and the violent systems I am complicit in through my willful ignorance and conscious choosing, is shared with him. So too is my salvation. The more I allow myself to be formed by his community’s lived justice, the less naive I will remain to my own country’s complicity, the less I will feel the need to see vengeance as a necessary tool within my salvation, and the less I will locate wisdom within a hopeless cynicism that fails to make sense of Eliseo’s resilient life.
Eliseo exists as a constructive foil to failed structures of justice developed throughout Villeneuve’s film. Let his life and the many lives of those like him remind us of the hope found within communities of faithful resilience.
