Sicario's Precision Mastery Collapses Into Category Error
You nod at a list someone calls an argument, then realize they've arranged the pieces but proved nothing.
When a critic declares that Taylor Sheridan's Sicario is the greatest crime thriller of the 2010s without explaining what "greatest" measures or why nobody else would reasonably disagree, they're depending on an unstated assumption. That within a given genre, technical mastery and genre competence equal greatness. That the most skillfully constructed thriller is therefore the most important one.
Nobody says this out loud because it sounds absurd the moment you name it. It's doing all the work in the piece. Once you're assuming that definition, Sicario becomes defensible — it is, technically, a very well-made movie. The problem is that this assumption is completely contested in the actual world of crime-thriller criticism. Has been for years.
The 2010s crime-thriller form faced a fork in the road. One path led toward formal risk and narrative experimentation. The tradition of The Wire and early True Detective, shows willing to splinter their storytelling and refuse easy resolution. The other path led toward what Sheridan spent the decade perfecting: a kind of crystalline plotting efficiency, genre mastery as a virtue in itself. The thriller that works like clockwork and asks you to admire the clock. Critics who believe the medium's greatest moments require formal ambition read Sheridan's precision not as mastery but as constraint.
Critics who believe the medium's greatest moments require formal ambition read Sheridan's precision not as mastery but as constraint.
”Sicario is absolutely exemplary of the 2010s crime thriller. That's precisely the problem with calling it greatest. The film represents one answer to what the form should be, not the answer. Once you stop assuming that "greatest within genre conventions" and "greatest period" are the same thing, the whole ranking collapses into a category error. You're left wondering whether the critics who make definitive claims about prestige television are actually ranking what they saw or simply declaring allegiance to which formal choices they find more tolerable.
