In 1914, the US Congress assumed that a law aimed against the recreational use of coca leaves and opium poppies would stop people from taking recreational drugs. That assumption was catastrophically wrong. As we've learned during the last 98 years, the law does not always reflect the truth—and the gap between that particularly deluded law and the hard truth is filled with corpses.
When a trade is legal (like, say, refrigerators), businesspeople settle their differences through the courts. When a trade is illegal (like, say, marijuana or cocaine), businesspeople settle their differences with bullets and chainsaws. But a job market is a job market, and some people get paid to shoot those bullets and fire up those chainsaws. El Sicario, Room 164 is a documentary interview with one man who forged a life doing that kind of work—and, after he defected from the trade and found Jesus, has a quarter-million-dollar price on his head.
The film is shot in an anonymous hotel room near Juárez with our sicario—the Spanish slang for an assassin, derived from the Hebrew sicarii, who were basically Al Qaeda against Roman occupiers in the first century. (The etymology demonstrates, in part, that the narco trade isn't simply about business. Some narcos see their vocation as a calling, a moral struggle against a hypocritical first world that buys product then shoots or jails the salesmen for their services.)
But this sicario doesn't articulate a global view—he's a former foot soldier of 20 years, confessing to the camera with a black cloth over his head. He lays out the basics of the assassin's grooming: high-school kids do small runs then get sent to the police academy to learn the basics of surveillance, forensics, and gunplay. He talks about the difference between real sicarios and wannabes: Sicarios kill people with a few well-placed shots, wannabes spray bullets everywhere. He talks about the horrible things he's participated in: gang rapes and strangulations of women who didn't want to be a narco boss's girlfriend, informants hung by winches and boiled bit-by-bit in 50-gallon drums with doctors on hand to amputate the scalded body parts as the torture went along.
The film is based on an interview with a sicario conducted by journalist Charles Bowden, published in Harper's in 2009. The filmmakers do a great job with the restrictions of their setting (one masked guy in one hotel room). They give him a notepad and some markers so he can illustrate and doodle when he talks, and they add some quiet, lingering shots of Mexican cityscapes.
There is some controversy about whether the masked man in the film is the same man who spilled his guts to Bowden years ago. This sicario is so performative (he begins the film by meticulously adjusting his hood then launching into the middle of a dramatic story—a move straight from a Spalding Grey monologue) that it's difficult to tell whether the filmmakers did heavy editing or stumbled into a natural-actor gold mine. Moreover, the sicario is long on drama but short on details. He says some houses in some places are packed with dead bodies (sometimes up to 70 or 80) but doesn't tell us how they're hidden. He says corpses dumped publicly leave messages (a severed finger in the mouth means one thing, a severed finger in the anus means another thing) but doesn't give us any clues about what this cadaver-cryptography means.
Curious people will get itchy at these dodges and wonder if the whole thing is an exquisite, basically true (but not actually true) ruse. Regardless, El Sicario is a great film. For drug-war neophytes, it will open the gates to a very real, pertinent hell. For others, it will present more questions than it answers. 
