Compassion: Alejandro Gillick (Benicio del Toro) is tasked with kidnapping Isabela Reyes (Isabela Moner), the daughter of a drug lord.

The resolution of Sicario wasn’t all that enlightening, but its sequel, Sicario: Day of the Soldado, is even weaker.

The vision of dead bodies lying against the walls inside a house has stuck with me since I saw Denis Villeneuve’s 2015 hit film Sicario.

And before the credits roll, you see the slimy, secretive Alejandro Gillick (Benicio del Toro) shoot down an entire family. At Sicario’s altar of violence, even children are fair game.

But the film presents an argument, predicating its narrative on the greater good. Drug cartels are bad, but are they secondary to rule-breaking and casual brutality? What exactly is the greater evil?

Right off the bat, violence takes over Day of the Soldado. Mexican migrants cross a border to Texas before they are apprehended.

One of the migrants, a Muslim man, begins praying before blowing himself up. Then a gruesome scene occurs in which several men blow themselves up and others at a supermarket, including an imploring mother and a quiet child.

Josh Brolin’s Matt Graver then does what he does best. Gallon bottles of water, which he uses in the first movie to waterboard his detainees to extract information from them, are there.

In both Sicario and its sequel, Brolin imbues his character with a complex sense of abandon that his gruff demeanor never once betrays.

Anyway, Graver is there to help the United States government solve the problem plaguing them: the drug cartels’ new business of smuggling migrants across the border, including terrorists.

He’s going to have to play dirty, he says, to nobody’s surprise. He reaches out to Gillick, who’s enticed by the prospect of exacting revenge on the cartel that was involved in the murder of his family, the Reyes cartel, that may be behind the smuggling.

What’s their plan? Instigating war between the cartels to snuff them out, while leaving some necessary hands clean.

No issues: True to the form established in Sicario, Day of the Soldado never concerns itself with morality and merely hints at the larger issues at hand.

What follows sounds fitting for a movie that gloats in its disregard of, I don’t know, human rights stuff: Kidnap the Reyes cartel kingpin’s teenage daughter, Isabela Reyes (Isabela Moner), who is marked more by trauma than any other character in the film.

Day of the Soldado never bothers with the morality of human traffickers or the best way to handle them. Violence always seems like a good answer — scenes of blood splattering on the windshield are coded into the franchise’s DNA.

Day of the Soldado is a highly cynical film that merely hints at a larger story to tell — the plight of the migrants, the motivations of a criminal — and doesn’t bother to tell them.

Which is fine, but at least in Sicario, the centrifuge of the movie’s constant moral infighting anchors it. This time around, the brutality may as well be the endgame.

Directed by Stefano Sellima, Sicario: Day of the Soldado is still pretty much a competent action thriller. But Taylor Sheridan’s script, as a follow up to his engaging Sicario, Hell or High Water and Wind River, feels slightly weightless.

This would have been my only impression of the film if it had not been for a couple of important scenes that lend the movie some ambivalence. I won’t spoil them, but they exemplify del Toro’s complicated character, which was one of Sicario’s moral centers along with Emily Blunt’s Kate Macer.

The subplot involving a Mexican-American teenager (Elijah Rodriguez) who joins a group of human traffickers is also pretty satisfying (and that reveal toward the end).

“You believe change is the goal, really?” asks CIA agent Cynthia Foards (Catherine Keener). That “really” feels potent: what’s the alternative?

Day of the Soldado argues that there’s only one way out of every problem, and it does not fail to demonstrate this in the cynicism it inflicts on its audience.

Men on a mission: Alejandro Gillick (Benicio Del Toro, right), Matt Graver (Josh Brolin, left) and Steve Forsing (Jeffrey Donovan) are enlisted to combat rampant human trafficking at the US-Mexican border in Sicario: Day of the Soldado.

— Photos courtesy of Black Label Media, Rai Cinema, Thunder Road Pictures

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Sicario: Day of the Soldado
(Black Label Media, Thunder Road Pictures, Rai Cinema, 122 minutes)

Director: Stefano Sollima
Cast: Josh Brolin, Benicio del Toro, Isabela Moner, Matthew Modine, Catherine Keener, Jeffrey Donovan