I'm not particularly fond of action films and the plot didn't tell me much, but after having appreciated them so much in Blade Runner 2049 I was curious to see another film made by Denis Villeneuve (the director) and Roger Deakins (the director of photography, a living legend of cinema).
 

The film is about FBI anti-drug agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) who deals with anti-drug activities and gets involved in a special task force organized to fight the Mexican cartels. The brutality of the film lies in the extremely crude and realistic way with which it describes the actions of the Mexican traffickers: some scenes seem completely invented, but in an episode of his podcast Roger Deakins revealed that the most brutal scenes (and we are really at a step away from bordering on actual horror) are taken from real news events, to the point that the authors had to resort to CGI to avoid traumatizing the inhabitants of the Mexican cities in which some scenes were filmed, because they could have reported to the memory of traumatic events they had witnessed.
 

The film, however, does not aspire - at least not openly - to be considered "a true story", but focuses on the two protagonists. Agent Macer (who represents morality and justice) and the ambiguous character played masterfully by Benicio del Toro, at the same time an emotionless monster and a man who lives in pain. It is from the comparison between these two extremes that the heart of a splendid film is born which in some way made me think of "The Untouchables", of which it shares the same sense of constant threat due to the fact of not being able to understand whose can really be trusted completely.