![]() 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. 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. There you have it: the good (Banderas), the bad (Depp), and the ugly (Dafoe). 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’s no pain in Rodriguez’s violence - he turns it into athletic, action-figure fantasy. ![]() Defying the laws of physics, men are hit with bullets and fly backwards well past any credible theory of momentum. (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. In short, you can enjoy Once Upon a Time in Mexico without having seen the other two. 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. 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. ![]() 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. Rodriguez isn’t out to break ground, though he’s content to throw a party on it. ![]() 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. ![]()
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