Hats off to the real star of this movie - my hometown of McAllen, TX! Dangerous human smuggling crossing point, coyotes hanging out at the grocery right around the corner from my house on Trenton, and at the local mall food court. All in the shadow of the wimpy border wall as it exists now. Don't let President Trump see this movie. Check out the trailer:
While the story was easy to nitpick, it was a complicated and interesting plot. Our "hero" Josh Brolin is brought back to the US to disrupt the human trafficking which has become more profitable than drugs for the Mexican cartels. To pit the Matamoros Cartel against the Reyes Cartel, he and his "Dirty" friend Benecio Del Toro hatch this harmless idea to kidnap a teenage daughter from Carlos Reyes at gunpoint, steal her to the US, torture her, and blame the Matamoros Cartel.
But when the undercover plan is busted, they have to try and put the pieces back together. And it is never a good idea to get heavy handed "operators" to put things back in place. Lots of shades of grey here.
I don't want to give away too much, but it would have been nice to have this actually filmed in South Texas. In that respect, my (executive produced by me) movie Transient captured a lot of these same ideas more realistically, and without a $35 MM budget: the migrant crossing, the coyotes and the borderland.
Written and directed by Taylor Sheridan, it's a lot like another movie of his, Hell or High Water, and is strongly influenced by No Country for Old Men.
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