The Creator of Yellowstone Wrote This Wildly Underrated Film Sequel
For the past six years, the career of Taylor Sheridan has been experiencing quite a renaissance, especially on television, with such acclaimed series as Yellowstone (as well as its prequels) and Mayor of Kingstown. While the popularity of his TV works continues to increase, many have overlooked the fact that he has also contributed to some rather successful films, some of which were even before Yellowstone’s inception. Since 2015, he’s written screenplays for films like the hit 2017 thriller Wind River, and he even received a Best Original Screenplay Oscar nomination for 2016’s Hell or High Water. Despite the success of these films, none of them have been quite as big a hit at the box office as Sicario was in 2015. Its success eventually led to a sequel in 2018, Sicario: Day of the Soldado.
It’s often been said that most sequels aren’t able to meet the same standards that were set by the originals. Day of the Soldado may not have lived up to the heights of the first installment, but it’s also a film that has far too many great qualities going for it to have any fans discredit it as a bad sequel. Thanks to the top-notch action directed by Stefano Sollima, the haunting score by Hildur Guðnadóttirto, and especially the strength of Sheridan’s writing, it ultimately became the sequel that both critics and audiences didn’t know they wanted.
How Day of the Soldado Follows and Holds Up Against the First Sicario Film
The first Sicario film wasn’t exactly the typical sort of action thriller that most audiences are accustomed to. Like the rest of Denis Villenueve’s works, from Arrival to Dune, it was also an atmospheric slow-burn of a film, but that was also what helped make it such an effective one. Its pacing played to the strength of the story’s grit and intensity, and the cinematography and music only amplified it further. It tells the story of FBI agent Kate Mercer (played by Emily Blunt), who is enlisted by a government task force led by CIA Officer Matt Graver (Josh Brolin) and assassin Alejandro Gillick (Benicio Del Toro) to help carry out a mission to take out an incredibly powerful and brutal Mexican drug cartel leader. It was an intense and violent film, and not in a way that was meant to be consumed for popcorn entertainment.
Even its ending left it on quite a downer note, and as a result, it seemed like the story had been definitively wrapped up with no room for a continuation. But what makes Day of the Soldado work so well as a follow-up is that it isn’t necessarily a continuation of the first film’s story, but rather a new one that places its focus more on Brolin and Del Toro’s characters. The sequel revisits Alejandro and Agent Graver as they try to carry out a mission that will instigate a war between two rival cartels to prevent them from trafficking terrorists across the U.S. border. Similar to the first one, it tackles the issues and dangers of drug cartels, as well as the often inhumane lengths that the U.S. government is willing to go to decrease conflict. While none of the returning characters evolve or go through any major development in the sequel, it does reveal a bit more about them, especially with Alejandro, and shows that there’s certainly more complexity to both him and Graver than just being two hardened individuals who take orders without question.
