Did they... Did they put makeup on Emily Blunt on the Sicario poster?

I've been walking past the poster for Emily Blunt's hitman drama Sicario for weeks now, but just assumed the one-sheet in Holborn station had been vandalised. Apparently that's not the case: every version of this Sicario poster has Emily Blunt made up to look like a Victorian prostitute.

The disconnect between a movie and its marketing team can often be quite fatal, particularly for a film that's a hard sell in the first place. I understand that Sicario is not an easy film to sell to the masses: Denis Villeneuve's Mexico-set narcotics thriller isn't set in outer space and doesn't have any superheroes or Godzillas or Minions in it. But the poster below seems like a particularly flagrant attempt to dolly up a movie - or, at least, the movie's female star - despite its fairly grim subject matter.



Granted, the yellow colour filter - which is de rigeur for any movie set in Mexico about the drugs trade, thank you very much Steven Soderbergh - does make all of the cast look like their own Simpsons characters. But correct me if I'm wrong here: that's a very definite payload of blusher on Blunters, no? And a fairly thick slab of lippy too? Let's take a closer look.



Emily Blunt: Armed & Fabulous. I am almost 100% sure it is not FBI policy that female agents must wear a full face of makeup before any gun battles (it'd all run in the heat). For comparison, here is a still photo of Emily Blunt doing acting in Sicario, wearing her normal face.



Pouty lips? Maybe. Flushed cheeks from heightened blood flow? Definitely. Sexy clown vibe? Absent. Here's another look back at Emily Blunt on the Sicario poster to jog your memory.



I think they accidentally got her stuck on whore.