Presuming that Once Upon A Time In Mexico, the latest helping in Robert Rodriguez's trilogy of modern westerns, is coherent would be a mistake. The convoluted plot involves a treacherous CIA agent, a retired gunslinger, and the ruthless leader of a Mexican drug cartel. But if the plot and the background characters can be ignored, Mexico should offer enough thrills to satisfy the late-night movie crowd.
Mexico chronicles the efforts of CIA agent Sands (Johnny Depp) to recruit El Mariachi (Antonio Banderas), a gunslinger obsessed with revenge, for a difficult assignment: to kill a general who has been hired by a drug lord named Barillo (Willem Dafoe) to lead a coup. Although Sands pits El (as Banderas is called in the film) against Barillo, the rogue agent's real plan is to allow the Mexican President to be killed so that a senior aide can take power. In return for allowing him to gain power, the aide will permit Sands to steal the 20 million pesos that Barillo used to buy his coup-crazy general. When El discovers Sands' plan, the gunslinger tries to smuggle the Mexican President to safety, kill Barillo's general, and steal the 20 million pesos intended for the departed general. (Incidentally, the unnamed general killed El's wife, played by Salma Hayek in flashbacks, and child in a back-story.)
Mexico teems with the kinetic energy that made the micro-budgeted El Mariachi and Desperado, its prequels, cult hits. The violence is so stylized and sporadic that the movie is far more attractive than earlier popcorn fanfare of the summer. But Rodriguez overestimated his ability to hold his audience, and the movie stumbles through too-long periods of unnecessary backlog and expendable characters. Someone should have told Rodriguez that the first two films in his Mariachi series were popular because of the reckless disregard they held for the constraints of contemporary celluloid. They were successes because they broke the rules, not because they conformed to them. Mexico lays new grounds in terms of what epileptic film editing can do for a fight scene, but the writing is too caustic and too bare to create a stable foundation for the entertaining set pieces that Rodriguez creates.
Depp is the most attractive element of Mexico. The other main characters–most notably Banderas and Dafoe–are shell-shocked and expressionless, as if they can't keep up with the action engulfing them. Equal parts comedy and ruthlessness, Depp's Sands is the sort of unrepentant sinner who would wear "CIA-Cleavage Inspection Agency" T-shirts and carry thousands of dollars in a child's tin lunchbox. Depp pulls off his star-turn with incredible ease, and at the end of the day, it is he, not Banderas, Hayek, or even the great nation of Mexico, who stands victorious.
Mexico is most attractive when it pays homage to Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns of yester-year. Leone and Rodriguez have both realized what many contemporary directors fail to understand, that it isn't the plot that drives a movie, or even the directing, but the characters. Depp's Sands, like Clint Eastwood's portrayal of a ruthless bounty hunter in Leone's films, is too slick, too conniving, and too clever to resist. Where Rodriguez fails is in confusing his film by including too many cool characters. Leone succeeded by trusting his films solely to Eastwood.
While it may not have the same do-it-yourself feel of El Mariachi, Once Upon a Time in Mexico is supremely enjoyable. The bullets and the plot twists fly fast and easy. If you forget the background noise and just enjoy the thrills, Mexico can be a fun place to visit for a few hours.
John Visclosky. John Visclosky is, suffice it to say, "hardly the sharpest intellectual tool in the shed," which is why he has stupidly chosen to here address himself in the third person. He's a mellow sort of guy who enjoys movies and sharing his feelings and innermost … More »
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