Desperado
Robert Rodriguez had literally made cinematic history with the 1992 release of El Mariachi, made on a budget of merely $2000 which went on to be deemed “good enough” to be shown at both film festivals and theatrical engagements. Good enough certainly wasn’t enough to describe it though, as it was an action packed extravaganza telling the story of a meek guitar player (Carlos Gallardo) who gets caught up in a small town’s cartel drug war, only to find himself to be amazingly proficient at killing in his own right when forced to pick up a gun in self defense, eventually “inheriting” (from an evil hitman who was one of the primary villains) a guitar case filled with all sorts of weapons and in the process both falling in love with and then tragically losing the woman who had given him shelter and comfort during the tumultuous events of the story. After killing the man responsible for her death, the Mariachi rode off into the sunset in a movie whose impact was so profound that Columbia Pictures immediately offered Rodriguez a budget of $7 million to come up with a sequel that would receive a wide release and the full promotional backing of the studio. That sequel would come out in 1995, with Rodriguez sadly replacing his original lead actor with Antonio Banderas since nobody would have probably bought into Carlos Gallardo as being the star of a big time action movie (although Gallardo would come back here to play one of the Mariachi’s major allies for a key battle scene late in the film). The storyline to justify this sequel was also a little iffy, since the Mariachi HAD avenged the death of his beloved at the end of the first film, but the explanation given here was that the stakes had been raised and now the Mariachi had set out to destroy the ENTIRE cartel that the original film’s villains had belonged to, an interesting idea since A) the people he was now hunting had absolutely nothing to do with her actual death except for being business associates and B) these same drug dealing villains have utterly NO idea whatsoever why this guy carrying a guitar case full of guns is systematically hunting them down as a result. No matter though, as Rodriguez starts the film at a whirlwind pace and wastes precious little time going through some big name cameos (including Cheech Marin, Quentin Tarantino, Steve Buscemi and Danny Trejo) like toilet paper, wiping most of them out almost as quickly as they appear before settling down somewhat and having Banderas’ Mariachi hunker down to receive aid and comfort from Salma Hayek’s local bookstore owner (whose character arc is almost exactly similar to the first film’s female lead) while preparing to take on the main cartel boss (Joaquim De Almeida) head to head. But De Almeida’s Bocho as it turns out has a LOT of henchmen at his disposal that need to be dealt with first (and after the lot of them have been depleted the Bocho character actually points out that essentially, he too along with his business interests are now dead in the water before any of Banderas’ bullets ever touch him). The problems arise mostly from the lack of heart as compared to the first film (when the action sequences were just as good as they are here) where Gallardo’s Mariachi was just a sweet, boyish musician who never intended to be a killer but was forced to out of necessity (making the first film as much of a tragedy as anything else), but in Banderas’ hands the character is pretty much an angel of death from the first frame on (except for some platitudes of regret that are meant to give him some levity), although the opening dream sequence (where the original villains from El Mariachi briefly appear) indicates that Rodriguez was taking more of the abstract approach as to why the Mariachi had now changed in overall appearance, motivation and demeanor from the first film to the second. Unlike the deadly serious and undeniable intensity of the original film, this sequel more or less breaks down into being an over the top, shoot em up video game and a comedic one at that, trying to generate belly laughs from the fast talking characters played by Tarantino and Buscemi and then having the shootouts turn out to be so ridiculous (and unrealistic) that one can’t help but laugh and groan at the same time. There is a noble attempt to give at least some of Bocho’s many, many henchmen some sincere character development and Trejo’s appearance hits the film like a thunderous tornado that is just as quickly over and done with, but the overall impression one gets here is that Rodriguez is killing off boatloads of key characters in every action scene and then stalling for time all while lining up some new targets for Banderas to take out. The last 20 minutes, with Banderas teaming with Gallardo and a third companion for an epic killing fest coupled with the final confrontation against Bocho himself makes for a compelling finish to a movie that has essentially laid waste to almost everything and everyone in its path in order to reach that point and while the final product is at times wildly entertaining, one wonders what it would have been like if Banderas had been used in a straight up remake of El Mariachi so that he could have personally built the character from the ground up in depicting his backstory (hence having the audience connect to him as strongly as they did to Gallardo) instead of just trotting him out and simply telling the viewer: “He’s a badass, deal with it.” So as a mindless shoot em up this sequel scores some major points, but as anything more than that, one would still need to defer to the original…
7/10