Once Upon a Time in Mexico | Review

Plenty of la Vida loca in plot-confused, character misused action fest.

With villains ready to pump led into anything that moves, a classic modern day Zorro type of hero waiting for his final confrontation of all confrontations and sun scorched Mexico as a backdrop, director Robert Rodriguez’s homage to the spaghetti-Western brings us back to a place we’ve been before. When El Mariachi first hit the circuit it paved a way for the director and also inspired filmmakers with a credit-card limit budget to shoot away with their digital cameras. Not much as changed, Antonio Banderas (Femme Fatale) provides a couple of cheesy one-liners, guitar playing poses and some gun-toting moves while Rodriguez regales in the not-so-complex digital video filmmaking mode.

Once Upon a Time in Mexico has nothing new to add to the trilogy with the one exception of notably fun and easy performance from Johnny Depp who predated his Pirates of the Caribbean character with this one, a sharp tongued con man with a grand master plan. Except, when the plan is revealed, the scenario comes across as a patched together mess- a sort of bullet-riddled plot that intermixes itself with this range of unimportant characters by actors giving nothing but tongue-and-cheek performances, what is the point of putting a Willem Dafoe (Auto Focus) or Mickey Rourke (Spun) in a picture if there performances are as important as singer Enrique Iglesias’s bit piece personage.

I like the idea of creating a narrative space between the second and third film and using the occasional flashback to explain what happened to Maxim pin-up girl Salma Hayek’s character, however, the classic tale of revenge seeps of boredom because the anger of the protagonist know sometimes as “The” is hardly effective in black and white flashback mode. Instead I would have chosen an aspired build up of a Charles Bronson I’m in a very angry mood right now type of mode to parallel the furor of the character with his heavy usage of bullets.

Some of the confusion remains once the dust is cleared, understanding who is on who’s side might take a hand-drawn pad and paper family tree for further explanations and the one element that helps the viewer forget about these alliances are the big bangs that are followed by even bigger bangs. If the script and characters would have been less comic book and more The Way of the Gun then the wait for the final credits might not have felt so eagerly desired. Its time for a boost of creativity for Rodriguez as his film trilogies of El Mariachi and Spy Kids have definitely used up the reservoir of imaginative juices.

Rating 1 stars