once
upon a time
in mexico |
director/screenwriter/
cinematographer/editor/music
Robert Rodriguez
producers
Elizabeth Avellan
Carlos Gallardo
Robert Rodriguez
cast
Antonio Banderas (El Mariachi)
Salma Hayek (Carolina)
Johnny Depp (Sands)
Mickey Rourke (Billy)
Eva Mendes (Ajedrez)
Danny Trejo (Cucuy)
Enrique Iglesias (Lorenzo)
Cheech Marin (Belini)
Rubén Blades (Jorge)
Willem Dafoe (Barillo)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 97m
u.s.
release: September
12, 2003
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official website
other robert
rodriguez films
reviewed on this website:
- desperado
- the
faculty
- four
rooms ("misbehavers"
segment)
- from
dusk till dawn (short review)
- sin
city
- spy
kids
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"They call him El. As
in 'the.'" That's the sort of solemnly funny line you might
hear in a Sergio Leone western, and writer-director Robert Rodriguez
has explicitly patterned his "Mariachi" trilogy --
El Mariachi (1992), Desperado
(1995), and now Once Upon a Time in Mexico -- on Leone's
groundbreaking movies. Rodriguez isn't out to break ground, though;
he's content to throw a party on it. It's somewhat funny that
after eleven years and ten movies, Rodriguez is still working
the same hyperkinetic, B-movie side of the street; he aims low
and hits, but he hits with style and grace. What's more, he gives
us a final chapter without any gravitas whatsoever --
it's as fast and unpretentious as the $7,000 El Mariachi
was, and at times you even forget that El Mariachi (Antonio Banderas)
is in it.
Like Leone's "Man with
No Name" trilogy, Rodriguez's three "Mariachi"
movies share a lead character but not much else; it's as if God
hit the restart button and gave the hero a slightly different
backstory. In short, you can enjoy Once Upon a Time in Mexico
without having seen the other two. (The other two are self-contained,
too; I think Rodriguez, and Leone before him, did that by design
so that people could watch them in any order and not get lost.)
These movies unfold in their own sandy, ornery universe, where
firearms perform a kind of propulsive magic. Defying the laws
of physics, men are hit with bullets and fly backwards well past
any credible theory of momentum. There's no pain in Rodriguez's
violence -- he turns it into athletic, action-figure fantasy.
This time, El Mariachi is hired
by a shady CIA agent (Johnny Depp) to kill a drug lord (Willem
Dafoe) who's out to kill the president of Mexico. There you have
it: the good (Banderas), the bad (Depp), and the ugly (Dafoe).
Depp's performance here, as a morally neutral and ruthless agent
who loves disguises, is consistent with the work he's been doing
lately, in Pirates
of the Caribbean and others. Depp's character has a false
third arm he uses for no particular reason, and he has a thing
about trying the pork dish in every dive in Mexico. In Depp's
hands, this unpredictable "law enforcer" becomes an
eccentric who, we feel, joined the CIA solely to broaden his
experience of weirdness. He's certainly the hippest presence
to adorn a Rodriguez film since George Clooney commandeered a
Winnebago in From
Dusk till Dawn.
Rodriguez indulges in an overabundance
of plot, with characters double-crossing each other in what seems
like every scene. He brings in Eva Mendes as a questionable cop
and Mickey Rourke, looking like a failed wax sculpture of himself,
as Dafoe's conflicted American goon. We get flashbacks reuniting
Banderas with Salma Hayek, who shows a previously unacknowledged
flair with throwing knives; the pair undergo a setpiece worthy
of vintage Spielberg, in which they're chained together by the
wrists and have to negotiate a five-story building down to the
street to escape assassins. Ex-con Danny Trejo, he of the asphalt
face, is back in Rodriguez World as a grim killer who gets that
"El" line.
Once Upon a Time in Mexico couldn't be more lightweight, but
heaviness was never the point or the promise of these movies.
For a grand total of $37,007,000 -- about a quarter of what it
costs to make one typical Hollywood action film that isn't a
quarter as fun as this one -- Rodriguez has made an entire trilogy
of inventive, restlessly entertaining action flicks. (He must
also be the first director to release two trilogy-enders that
opened at #1 at the box-office in the same summer -- Spy
Kids 3D being the other.) This happily productive filmmaker
works out of his own private digital Xanadu, and does as much
of it himself as he can get away with -- editing, cinematography,
music, and probably waxing Salma Hayek's post-Frida
eyebrows, too. Rodriguez has yet to make anything remotely artistic,
but he also has yet to make anything remotely boring.
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