Once upon a time in Mexico
Cert. 18
Director: Robert Rodriguez
Starring: Antonio Banderas, Johnny Depp.
Runtime: 105 minutes
Rewind back to 1995 and you may remember watching something like this before. After an extended siesta, Desperado star Antonio Banderas reprises his role as the guitar-playing, gun-toting hero with a price on his head. Inflation and all things considered, the stakes have gone up.
Riding high thanks to its US box office success, Once Upon a Time in Mexico ties up a vague trilogy of Latin American westerns by Rodriguez, which began with a modest $7,000 flick over a decade ago.
Not that history matters very much as far as the latest story line goes.
Banderas is gunman El Mariachi, a living legend hiding out in the obscurity of small town Mexico. Enter one ruthless Agent Sands (Depp) with a mission in need of recruits and its goodbye to the retirement home in the sun. Still tormented by the loss of his alluring wife (Hayek), Mariachi struggles back into the life of an action hero.
Politics is everything, with CIA operative Sands determined to manipulate the coup d’état being planned by an evil drug baron. Deals and double-crossings pile up as high as the body count, if you can keep track of numbers. The fast and furious gun battles involve even faster changes of camera angle, all mixed with a spattering of one on one shoot-outs.
Rodriguez‚s links with Quentin Tarantino stretch across his movie career, but any influence here is muted, except perhaps in the sudden trigger-pulling outbursts and torture. The man behind Spy Kids is keen to stamp out his own style. Like Tarantino, Rodriguez did much more than directing. According to the credits, he shot, chopped and scored this movie.
On screen, Banderas is even more of a one man band, spending as much time in daydreams as he does dodging bullets. His solitary flashbacks and solemn gazes to camera will no doubt appeal to fans, but they sap the energy from what is supposedly an action movie. A promising partnership with his two sidekicks goes unexplored, leaving them with little to work with.
Depp emerges as the film‚s selling point. Watching his increasingly corrupt character pull every string going compensates for the adrenaline deficit. The combination of mobile phone wielding tourist and Matrix-style warrior is intriguing, even for mainstream thrill seekers. His throwaway remarks are charismatic, and stop the movie taking itself too seriously. But even Depp stumbles. Attempts to stand out leave him looking woefully lost at times. At least they do in a setting defined only by repeated use of the word tequila.
Of course, none of this would be important if the characters were just there to shoot each other. But the film aspires to be more complex than the average gun-fest, and is weakened because it does not succeed. The decent action sequences are condensed, but there is nothing coherent to fill the void this opens. Although Depp‚s character develops, the others do not break from their standard trigger-pulling moulds. The attempt to grind out a deceptively simple plot appears cumbersome. The result is an average movie – but one way or another, you feel it could have been so much more. Save it for a wet Sunday afternoon.
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