One too many times in Mexico

Noel Vera

Robert Rodriguez's "Once Upon a Time in Mexico" is supposed to be
the sequel to his previous action flick "Desperado" (the working
title was "Desperado 2") while "Desperado" in turn was supposed to
be the sequel to his debut feature "El Mariachi" (the working title
for "Desperado" was "El Mariachi 2"). Rodriguez must have felt the
need to reach further, try encompass more; this being the third of
what has become a trilogy of action films, he must have felt the
need to work on a broad canvas, to create on a really large scale.

He isn't the first to do things this way; his most obvious model
would be, of course, Sergio Leone, whose "A Fistful of Dollars" was
a hit, spawning the sequel "For a Few Dollars More;" to cap his
trilogy, Leone came out with a far more ambitious work, the
epic "The Good, the Bad, and The Ugly," and just to confirm his
status as great pop fabulist, did "Once Upon a Time in the West,"
from which "Mexico" (among several other epic wannabes) borrows its
title.

Unfortunately, what worked well for Leone doesn't work quite as well
for Rodriguez. "El Mariachi" was a pleasant surprise, a scruffy
indie flick with some wit and fairly inventive action scenes, made
for what Rodriguez claimed was a mere $7,000 dollars (don't believe
it myself, but it makes for a nice little fairy tale). "Desperado"
was "El Mariachi" blown up a little; the cast was handsomer (Antonio
Banderas, the beauteous Salma Hayek), the budget bigger (some three
million dollars). It doesn't stay in mind as long as "Mariachi" did,
maybe because the entire concept was slim to begin with--a guitar
player wandering about with a guitar case full of weapons--and
really belongs in the seven-to-a-hundred thousand dollar production
bracket; the sequel was a pleasant enough divertissement (Hayek is a
welcome addition), but not much more…

This third installment seems to prove that less is more with
Rodriguez when it comes to budgets: the relationship between budget
and imagination doesn't just seem inversely proportionate, it seems
downright asymptotic--there's a definite sense of diminishing
returns, of much more bucks (around twenty-three to thirty million
worth) but far less bang. Oh, explosions galore, and enough bullets
to perforate the Great Wall of China, but it's difficult to retain
any interest, much less care: the problem probably lies in the
script, which is stuffed to the gills with complex plotting and
ominous villains that brood more than do anything actually
villainous. Granted, this may be a more authentic picture of what
Mexican revolutions are like…but Rodriguez should really take his
cue from Leone, who throws whatever he feels like throwing--
intricate machinations, unbelievable plot twists, outrageous
characters full of operatic gestures--at you, but never forgets to
entertain you. A funny aside, a quick bit of sadism, a flash of
nudity--anything to keep your interest. Rodriguez commits the
cardinal sin of being dull in spots, then of not delivering the
goods to make up for the dullness.

And there's something to Leone--one hesitates to call it a vision; a
feeling, perhaps, an expansive, mind-stretching emotion that isn't
quite comparable to anything that immediately comes to mind. Maybe a
fist moving across a panoramic screen in slow motion: lyrical in its
trajectory, terrible in its inevitability, with the solemn promise
of bone-breaking impact, the sound magnified to a dull roar--Leone's
movies feel something like that (though, come to think of it, he's
rarely if ever used slow motion). His best work ("The Good, the Bad,
the Ugly;" "Once Upon a Time in the West;" "Once Upon a Time in
America") is scaled larger-than-life; deliberately unrealistic,
anachronistic even, yet at the same time precisely, masterfully
executed. Perhaps the perfect visual metaphor for what Leone does is
De Niro in "Once Upon a Time in America" (his most seriously
overblown yet in parts most wildly beautiful film), sucking on an
opium pipe: Leone for a time sucked on the biggest, most elaborate
opium pipe in the world, and he blew generous clouds of smoke for
his audience to enjoy.

Rodriguez's movies are more small-scale, more reductive, with the
cunning and fast moves of a pack rat rather than a flamboyant
eagle. "Desperado" was okay, but was starting to show some
bloat; "Mexico" despite the relatively low budget is almost all
bloat. It overreaches without compensating, not knowing Leone's
recipe for holding on to the viewer's attention, no matter what
scale he's working on. Rodriguez is good enough to do smart,
disreputable cross-genre work with crack editing; "Mariachi," after
all, is the "lone gunman" Western a la Leone crossed with
the "innocent dupe" thriller a la Hitchcock; the "Spy Kids" films
are essentially family-type pictures crossed with James Bond; "From
Dusk Till Dawn" (for me his most enjoyable work) is a "crime spree"
flick crossed with vampires. He needs to mix-and-match, to have
jokes playing off genre conventions to retain any interest in his
work. What he lacks is the simpler yet somehow far more difficult
talent of Leone, of taking his world seriously, spinning off
gigantic myths to float improbably in the air from the fireside
where he sits, cross-legged, surrounded by a spellbound audience.

There are compensating pleasures in this picture, nevertheless.
Glimpses of Ms. Hayek (all too brief, unfortunately); nice turns
from Willem Dafoe and Mickey Rourke and a Chihuahua, respectively;
Eva Mendes, sexy but playing a seriously underwritten character;
Ruben Blades, flashing a pair of terrifyingly intense laser-beam
eyes that, unfortunately, aren't allowed to fix on any particular
target (if Rodriguez had cast Blades as the Mariachi, then we'd have
something really interesting). And Johnny Depp--Depp, who seems to
have a fair amount of skill for acting but an absolute genius for
choosing interesting roles, even from the most unpromising material
(he was the saving grace of the otherwise mediocre "Pirates of the
Caribbean")--Depp plays Agent Sands, a shifty, unreliable CIA agent
who ropes the Mariachi into this whole mess and, making one too many
clever maneuvers, gets himself seriously maimed. A crippled CIA
agent with a trick arm and a lust for good, slow-cooked pork--it's
one of the silliest thing I've ever heard of, as if Rodriguez had
cut and paste elements from a stack of secondhand comic books, yet
Depp somehow invests the character with likeable roguish charm and
an eerily beautiful physical grace, especially when his Sands
blunders not-quite-so-helplessly up and down the streets of Mexico.
He would make a nice little metaphor or symbol or something for a
much better film.

(First printed in Businessworld, 9/26/03)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)