Emily Blunt to reprise role from Denis Villeneuve's "spine-chilling" crime thriller

Good news for fans of acclaimed crime thriller films: the third Sicario film has just received some major updates. Not only are Benicio del Toro and Josh Brolin returning, but Emily Blunt is also back after sitting the second one out.

Deadline reports that Peaky Blinders and A Thousand Blows' Steven Knight wrote a draft of the script that impressed all three actors, who then signed on to return.

Padraic McKinley has reportedly come on board as director and will be reworking the script with Knight based on notes from the actors, with a plan to film at the start of next year.

Related: UK film release dates

Plot details are being kept under wraps, while producers are looking to the ship this entry around after Lionsgate released the first two.

Directed by Denis Villeneuve, the first film was released in 2015 and has an excellent Rotten Tomatoes score of 91% positive from 278 reviews.

"Sicario hones in on violent grit and cashes in on intense, impressive performances for a twisted, spine-chilling dive into the Mexican-American drug war," wrote ComicBook.com, while Mark Kermode called it "horribly efficient, exploiting our anxieties and expectations with cruel precision".

Echoing those comments, The Independent said: "Sicario may leave an unpleasant taste but it is a slick, accomplished thriller."

Related: Other Mommy called "dumb" and an "incoherent embarrassment" as it lands brutal Rotten Tomatoes score

The second film, called Sicario: Day of the Soldado, Sicario 2: Soldado or simply Soldado based on where you live, came out in 2018 with Italian director Stefano Sollima taking over.

It received a more mixed reception compared to the first, sitting at just 62% positive on Rotten Tomatoes from 287 critic reviews.

A common consensus among reviews is that's a very cynical affair, with the New York Post's review summing it up well: "Without a humanizing element like Blunt's character, this whole grim affair is just a race to the bottom in which everyone loses."

With Blunt's return, can the film series return to the heights of the original?

The first Sicario can be streamed on BBC iPlayer and Lionsgate+, available as a Prime Video add-on channel. The sequel is currently also on iPlayer.

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Joe Anderton is a freelance news writer at Digital Spy, having worked there since 2016. In his time, he's covered a host of live events and interviewed celebrities big and small. A big fan of TV and movies both mainstream and obscure, Joe also enjoys video games and in particular PlayStation. Joe currently does not use Twitter, but he only ever used it to tell people to watch the film Help! I'm a Fish.