-== DESPERADO ==-

It's easy to see why Hollywood went berserk over El Mariachi. Produced for the now-legendary sum of seven thousand dollars, Austin-based filmmaker Robert Rodriguez's fable of a guitar player caught in a border town war between rival drug gangs wasn't a revelatory piece of cinematic art. It was just a bunch of shoot-outs, sight gags, and flirty romantic interludes. But Rodriguez assembled them with astonishing flair, and proved that he understood the fundamentals of movie storytelling in a way that often eludes directors with larger budgets. It's hard to say whether Rodriguez's follow-up, Desperado, is better or worse than its predecessor, but the film's stylish swagger keeps you riveted. As in most action pictures, the plot is a pretext for mayhem. A gringo drifter (Steve Buscemi) enters a cantina full of rough characters and terrifies them with the tale of a mysterious mariachi player (smoldering Spanish mega-hunk Antonio Banderas) with a guitar case full of guns. The stranger just wiped out a dozen foes in a neighboring town. He has a vendetta against a local drug lord name Bucho (Joachim De Almeida), whose underlings killed his sweetheart. And he's coming this way. Duck! After a brilliantly choreographed close-quarters shoot-out in a bar--during which almost every interesting character Rodriguez just introduced ends up riddled with bullets--the Mariachi is wounded. He's nursed back to health by a beautiful bookstore owner (played by the heart-wrenchingly sexy Mexican actress Salma Hayek--one of the few people on earth beautiful enough to share the screen with Banderas). The rest of the movie is a series of gunfights, love scenes, humorous interludes, and wild escapes, all shot in the same deliriously hyperreal manner. When you lay down six bucks for a movie titled Desperado, you expect an Olympic-caliber display of cinematic ass-kicking, and in scene after scene Rodriguez delivers the goods. Unfortunately, Desperado doesn't have any kind of melodramatic arc; it just stumbles along toward an oddly abrupt finale that's both unmotivated and unsatisfying. Rodriguez's penchant for killing off endearing characters seems less like nihilistic prankishness than evidence of a moviemaker more comfortable with bloodletting than with human emotion. But as comic-book ludicrous as it is, the film still has the structure of a spiritual journey. And it's on this level that Desperado--despite its barrage of Roman Catholic iconography--falls curiously flat. The plot is about a man who has lost his humanity and must wander a bloodthirsty wasteland to rediscover it--a theme many great action films have explored with ferocious conviction. But, although Rodriguez flirts with these mythic elements, he doesn't go all the way with them. Unlike Sam Peckinpah, or even John Woo, he can't figure out how to torque up the picture's emotions so that they match his marvelously overheated action scenes. Desperado has plenty of blood and flame, but it's short on brains and soul.
--Matt Zoller Seitz

The mysterious, guitar toting "El Mariachi" walks the streets again to avenge the death of his beloved girl friend in this bloody actioner. The tale opens in a seedy cantina where a flustered American bursts in and tells how he just saw a stranger come in   and kill everyone in a neighboring bar. He then tells them that the  stranger was looking for a man named Bucho and he is heading for their bar. Suddenly, El Mariachi appears looking for Bucho, who uses the bar as a front for his narcotics smuggling ring. An enormous gunfight erupts. Still Mariachi does not catch the elusive drug dealer who must spend the rest of the film in hot  pursuit while simultaneously dodging the bullets of Bucho's henchmen.  -- Sandra Brennan, All-Movie Guide

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