15 Potentially Awesome Films Undermined By Their Terrible Endings

For much of the film, Sicario 2: Soldado is actually thoroughly competent as sequels go but unfortunately its final act is a bum-note and by the time it concludes, it feels like nothing has really happened.

In Sicario 2, Alejandro (Del Toro) is trying to protect Isabel (Isabela Moner), the daughter of a drug lord, from various criminals and the CIA (who want to kill Isabel in order to remove evidence of a US operation) who are pursuing them. The pair try to escape back to the USA on a bus smuggling immigrants in, but they are recognised and captured.

Alejandro is shot in the head but survives since, by pure chance, the bullet goes through his cheek and Isabel is then rescued by CIA Agent Matt Graver (Josh Brolin), who has a change of heart and disregards his orders, in an anticlimactic manner. The film then jumps ahead one year later and ends with Alejandro having a talk with the boy who shot him about becoming a hit-man.

Screenwriter Taylor Sheridan is highly talented and this was an unusually bad bit of writing for him. Not only is the final act very anticlimactic but Alejandro, the film's protagonist, feels entirely inessential and doesn't actually drive the plot forward, while it feels like pure luck that he and Isabel survive. It was a terrible bit of storytelling.