Los Niños Sicarios Essay

Little Assassins: Perpetrator or Victim?
Los Niños Sicarios, a film by Rob Lambert, captivatingly transports us to a world of Breaking Bad calibre that I for one know very little about. The title refers to child hitmen, who are brought under the exploitative wing of Mexican drug cartels for their dirty purposes.
The film’s genius lies in its blurring of the line between appearance and reality. Our protagonist seems like an ordinary American or Mexican-American teenager, playing football with his friends in the suburbs. He’s smiling and enjoying himself, until he approaches his phone and he’s immediately hardened, almost even before looking at it. The cryptic text he receives does not instill confidence in us viewers. Underneath what we would perceive as a 'normal' teenager is a military-trained assassin. We already know what we’re expecting because of the opening scene of dialogue that follows two Mexicans ambiguously discussing a hit, confirmed by the request for a “clean job” and a balaclava-clad lad descending gloomily on a barren location. In the football scene, the young boy promptly picks up his bike upon getting the

The housemate watches a news broadcast about the murder of who we just saw being shot, but he watches it with dead eyes. It does not deter him from what he’s presumably about to do.
Los Niños Sicarios is a great, but dismal, insight into a side of drug culture that less of us are familiar with, despite child soldiers being a worldwide affliction. Particularly as it happens here in America. As the credits roll, we see clips of real life print newspaper articles and mug shots of some ‘little assassins’, stressing that this is not just Breaking Bad. It was an important task that Lambert took on portraying this unfortunate phenomenon, but he executed it