Emily Blunt plays the Baker’s Wife in the Disney musical Into the Woods with her friend Meryl Streep. (They met while filming The Devil Wears Prada in 2006). Blunt’s performance is receiving rave reviews. The Wrap writes: “Blunt…manages the songs, the comedy and the despair of the baker’s wife with utter brilliance.” But can she play an American police officer who tries to take down a Mexican cartel boss? We’ll soon find out.
In the crime thriller Sicario, Blunt plays a cop in Tucson, New Mexico, who joins a secret CIA operation to take down a Mexican cartel boss. (“Sicario” means “hitman” in Spanish.) The film focuses on the legal loophole that allows mercenaries (Benicio del Toro and Josh Brolin) to breach the Mexican border to apprehend drug lords as long as they’re with a legitimate officer of the law (Blunt). As Deadline wrote of Blunt’s character: “Once across the border, the cop finds she has stepped into No Country For Old Men terrain, with violence and depravity she never imagined.” Sicario is directed by Denis Villeneuve, known for Prisoners, starring Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal. Taylor Sheridan (who played Deputy Chief David Hale of Sons of Anarchy) wrote the script.
