In a sentenceA cartel, a coup and a chihuahua, and only Johnny Depp seems to have been told the plot
In a cantina in Mexico, the bar owner Belini (Cheech Marin) tells a stranger the legend of El Mariachi (Antonio Banderas), the guitar player who shoots, and of his wife Carolina (Salma Hayek), who now appears only in his memory. The stranger is CIA agent Sands (Johnny Depp), who wants to hire him. A cartel boss, Armando Barillo (Willem Dafoe), is paying a general to overthrow the President of Mexico; Sands wants the general dead once the coup is done. The Mariachi, living alone in a village of guitar makers, has his own reasons to want the man. He gathers his old companions Lorenzo (Enrique Iglesias) and Fideo (Marco Leonardi), while Sands recruits a retired FBI agent, Jorge (Rubén Blades), and a hired gun, Cucuy (Danny Trejo). Barillo’s American lieutenant Billy Chambers (Mickey Rourke) carries a chihuahua.
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The third Mariachi film is loud, hot and busy, and it belongs to Johnny Depp’s rotten CIA man rather than to the hero. Rodriguez shoots, cuts and scores it himself, and the plot he wrote gets away from him well before the hour mark.
Robert Rodriguez finishes the story he began with El Mariachi in 1992 and continued with Desperado in 1995, and borrows a Sergio Leone title to tell us how big he means it to be. He directs, writes, shoots, cuts, scores, designs and produces. What he has made is 102 minutes of guns, guitars and sunburnt colour that is never dull for long and never clear for long either. It is a mixed bag, and most of what is good in it is Johnny Depp.
Depp plays Sands, a CIA agent with no superiors we ever see and no grievance we ever learn, as a tourist who has found a country he can do anything in. He wears pastel shirts and a T-shirt that spells out what the letters CIA stand for in his version of the agency. He orders the same pork dish in every restaurant and shoots the cook if it is too good, because it upsets the balance. He puts on a prosthetic third arm for no reason the plot requires. We laughed, properly and often, and every time it was Depp, lolling in a chair and explaining a coup to someone who did not ask.
The trouble is that the hero of the film is someone else. The Mariachi sits in a village of guitar makers, says little, and remembers his wife. Banderas is good at this kind of stillness, and the film gives him almost nothing to do with it; whenever he starts to brood, Rodriguez cuts back to Sands running errands. Hayek is in the film only in flashback. One of those flashbacks, told by Belini in the first ten minutes, has the two of them handcuffed together and swinging down the front of a hotel, storey by storey, as the balconies give way behind them. It moved us more than the rest of the film put together. It is the one time the film’s feeling and its stunt work are in the same shot.
Then the plot arrives. Barillo is paying a general to kill the President. Sands wants the general killed after he does it. Sands hires Jorge to go after Barillo, Cucuy to watch the Mariachi, and gets a cross officer called Ajedrez (Eva Mendes) involved for reasons that come later. Chambers, Barillo’s man, carries a small dog and looks sad about it. Each of these people gets a scene in which someone explains to them what is going on, and by the fourth such scene we had stopped listening. We were bored, and then we were cross about it, because the film kept promising a shootout as a reward for sitting through the briefing.
Rodriguez’s own photography is the hot, overbright kind: oranges and ochres pushed until the plaster looks lit from inside, nights the blue of a swimming pool. He cuts his action into fragments, a gun, a face, a man through a window, and at speed it has a rough energy. Lorenzo and Fideo’s guitar cases open into things that are not guitars, and that joke still works. His score is a twanging guitar and a trumpet playing the same figure over and over, and after an hour it is wallpaper. Graciela Mazón’s costumes are the best department: the Mariachi in black with silver down the seams, Sands in shirts no agency would sign off, Ajedrez pressed and buttoned to the throat.
Dafoe plays Barillo with a sneer and a tan and not much else. Rourke gives Chambers tired eyes and a good suit and seems to be in a quieter film. Blades is the one who stays with us, a retired man who has seen all this before and does not care to see it again. Trejo scowls. Iglesias and Leonardi are fine as backing.
Leone’s films took their time and let one man’s want fill the frame. Desperado had one revenge and one woman and got on with both. This has a dozen schemes and lets Depp carry all of them, which he nearly does. Watch it at home, where you can stop pretending to follow the coup and simply wait for him to come back. Something happens to Sands in the last act that we will not describe, and he is funnier after it.
Most critics land in the middle, and they agree on where the fun is. Johnny Depp’s CIA agent is singled out again and again as the best thing in the film, and several reviews say the energy drops whenever he is off screen. The action is generally thought to be handled well, and more than one critic finds the whole thing enjoyable in a loud, brash way even while admitting it disappoints.
The reservations cluster on the plot. Nearly everyone calls it overcomplicated, meandering or rushed, and a few find it a repeat of the series’ formula with Banderas pushed to the margins. The spread is fairly narrow: eight reviews are mixed, three are negative, none are positive. The AV Club takes the harder line, calling it an overstuffed misfire while still praising Banderas and the action choreography; Slant finds the violence increasingly rote. Collider, writing years later, mostly commends the Blu-ray transfer.
Bradshaw finds the film boisterously entertaining but says it loses energy when Johnny Depp is off screen. He singles out Depp’s comic performance as the main source of its fun.
Read the full review →Rooney finds the film an entertaining, technically accomplished action spectacle, though its overcomplicated plot weakens it. He especially praises Johnny Depp’s inventive performance and the soulful flashbacks to the Mariachi’s relationship with Carolina.
Read the full review →The page identifies this as a review, but its verdict is not accessible. The review text is behind a paywall, so its specific praise or criticism cannot be determined.
Read the full review →The page is inaccessible, so the critic’s verdict cannot be determined. Its praise or complaint cannot be verified from the available text.
Read the full review →The available description characterizes the film as brash and flamboyant, but does not reveal the critic’s overall verdict. It singles out the film’s influences, though the description is cut off before specifying them.
Read the full review →Dinning finds the film disappointing overall but still terrific fun. He praises Johnny Depp’s comic performance, while criticizing the meandering plot and the way it sidelines Banderas.
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Desperado · not reviewed yetThe previous Mariachi film, with one revenge, one woman and far less explaining.
Once Upon a Time in the WestThe Leone this film borrows its title from, slow where this is fast.
The Good, the Bad, the WeirdKorean Western with three thieves, a map and a desert chase that keeps its head.
The Wild BunchAmericans dying in Mexico for money and pride, shot and cut like nothing before it.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas · not reviewed yetDepp given a whole film to be as unhinged as Sands, and taking it.
