“Sicario” is a new drug-cartel thriller starring Emily Blunt, Benicio Del Toro and Josh Brolin in various states of stoical duress. If you want to get a taste of it, do what millions do when they should be doing something more useful: Check out one of the trailers.
But which trailer? There’s more than one online, which is usually the case with any mainstream picture. And depending on which one you watch, you’ll get a very different sense about where the story of “Sicario” goes, and who it’s about, and what sort of film you’re getting in the first place.
In time-honored fashion, the first official “Sicario” trailer gives too much away, but it’s relatively classy and honest about it. Blunt is front and center, as the FBI agent drawn into a clandestine operation to eliminate a particularly vicious drug lord. Second-billed Del Toro is the “sicario” (slang for “hitman”) working for Brolin’s sly CIA agent.
The movie itself is a sleek, brooding drama with a more complicated and ambiguous sense of methods and tactics than the usual shoot-’em-up. The trailer in question downplays those pesky ambiguities while representing the characters and their place in the narrative in straightforward fashion. It’s pretty good for what it is.
But get a load of the second “Sicario” trailer, the one being used in England and elsewhere.
This one gives it all, and I mean ALL, away. At the same time it sidelines the more reactive character played by Blunt in favor of Del Toro, who in this trailer ascends to the first position, the guy the movie’s about. “Meet the man who pulls the trigger,” the on-screen copy reads, as we witness Del Toro doing just that, over and over.
This artfully misleading trailer may push a few extra people through the doors opening weekend in the U.K. But many will feel as though they’ve been baited-and-switched.
It’s just business, as the bad guys always say in the movies. The point of a movie trailer is to lie to as many eyeballs as possible regarding the quality, the appeal and in some cases the very nature of a film’s storyline. When a film lacks a massive international box office sensation, or a premise that’s comically easy to describe, the marketing teams and trailer makers go to work.
Take “The Gift,” director Joel Edgerton’s recent, low-keyed, low-budget thriller starring Jason Bateman and Rebecca Hall as the couple beset by the social advances, and then worse, of the unsettling creep played by Edgerton.
There are moments in “The Gift” that play like a standard-issue home-invasion nightmare. Those moments are heightened in the trailer. But I heard from several people who took a chance on “The Gift” and liked it especially for its gradual peeling-back of backstory and motive. They all mentioned how the trailer lied; it looked cheesy and psycho-killer-y.
The most egregious issue with trailers is a simple one: oversharing. The recent “Terminator: Genisys” went out with at least one of its trailers blowing the whole story, including the revelation involving the Jason Clarke character. I’m sure the data exists to support the don’t-ask-we’ll-tell-you-all-anyway approach to the art of moviegoer seduction. But every now and then I see a teaser or a fuller official trailer that steers clear of spoilers, and attack-dog editing rhythms, and chooses a little indirection and evocation instead. And I think: I’ll take a chance on that.
