DESPERADO: Bless Me, Father, For I Have Just Killed Quite a Few Men

Desperado (1995) – Directed by Robert Rodriguez – Starring Antonio Banderas, Salma Hayek, Joaquim de Almeida, Steve Buscemi, Cheech Marin, Carlos Gallardo, and Quentin Tarantino.

DESPERADO is one of the coolest movies of the 1990s. I just reviewed Walter Hill’s Wild Bill, which spends a lot of time trying to be cool through style and editing, but DESPERADO simply is cool through the power of Banderas’ performance, Rodriguez’s energetic (but not headache-inducing) camera work, a fantastic score and soundtrack (thanks, Los Lobos!), and great performances that all blend together to create a very believable, hyper world of drugs, sex, and violence.

It’s telling that both films are released in 1995, where the old hand is trying new tricks and the new hand is reaffirming the old ones. I applaud Hill for trying something different with Wild Bill, but I’d be lying if I said it worked. DESPERADO, on the other hand, proves that Rodriguez can do with $7 million what he did with $7,000 in El Mariachi without getting lost amidst all his new toys and possibilities.

DESPERADO is a sequel to El Mariachi, with Antonio Banderas stepping into the role Carlos Gallardo originated. (Gallardo has a smaller role as Campa, one of Mariachi’s allies.) Banderas and Gallardo bring different qualities to the role of Mariachi. Where Gallardo infused the character with a boyish charm, Banderas gives him a much more traditionally cool, masculine edge. At the start of the film, Mariachi’s unnamed, storytelling ally (Steve Buscemi), enters Cheech Marin’s bar to spread the word that Mariachi is in town and to look for the local reaction when he mentions Bucho, the target of Mariachi’s quest this time around. Buscemi (I’m not going to keep calling him “unnamed storytelling ally”) gets the crowd’s attention by saying he just came from a bar where he saw “the biggest Mexican I’ve ever seen in my life,” signalling to us that Mariachi has grown quite a bit since he picked up Domino’s dog, hopped on her bike, and almost ran over a turtle.

Mariachi is now killer first, music being relegated into the stuff of dreams. He tries to play a couple times, but his damaged left hand (shot through by Moco at the end of El Mariachi) keeps him from being able to hold the neck, so first a little kid and then later Carolina (Salma Hayek) try their hand at accompanying him.

As with El Mariachi, it’s the non-action scenes that make DESPERADO something better than a solid action flick. Mariachi’s relationship with the young boy who walks around town with a guitar both humanizes him (when he’s teaching the boy) and then propels him towards greater anger (when he discovers the boy carries drugs in his guitar for Bucho), and finally shows us compassion (when the boy is accidentally shot during a showdown with Bucho’s men).

Where DESPERADO exceeds its preceding part is in not only Rodriguez’s growing abilities as a filmmaker, but in the extended cast of high-quality actors who are put to excellent use. There’s great chemistry between Cheech Marin as the bartender and Buscemi: “Hey, the bartender always survives!” “No, man, the bartender got it worst of all.” Danny Trejo shows up as a killer sent by the Columbians to watch over Bucho’s operation and take care of Mariachi. Forget Machete, this is Trejo at his bad-ass best as a silent, stalking, dangerous killer who uses throwing knives instead of guns. And Joaquim de Almeida steps into the role intended for Raul Julia and delivers a rather complex villain role. Alternatively, he’s mean, charming, scared, violent, conniving, generous … but his best moment comes when he’s trying to call the phone in his brand new car from his compound but he can’t because no one knows the car’s phone number. “Does anyone f*cking know the phone number to my car?!?” he yells to a compound full of henchmen that clearly don’t.

Rodriguez also shows he knows how to put together a great sex scene; instead of simply feeling perfunctory, Rodriguez puts as much attention to this scene as any of his shoot-’em-up sequences. Banderas is one half of the coupling and Salma Hayek is the other. DESPERADO is the film that launched Hayek into the Hollywood consciousness, and she’s rather good at being the gorgeous, semi-naive coffee shop/bookstore owner who ends up as Mariachi’s ally, nurse, and then lover. When Mariachi finds out she’s been allowing Bucho to use her store as a drop for drugs, Mariachi is furious with her, and it’s in these moments of desperate rage that Banderas really wins me over.

If there’s a weakness with DESPERADO it’s the ending twist of having Mariachi and Bucho be brothers. It’s not really needed but I suppose Rodriguez didn’t want to go down the same road as El Mariachi, with a bad guy who’s courting the woman who falls for the hero. That’s here, too, of course, but the thrust of these final scenes is between Bucho and his little brother.

DESPERADO is fantastic from start to finish, a slick, totally cool action flick that’s as good a contemporary western as anyone could want, and a fitting end to Western Month.

EL MARIACHI: The City I Thought Would Bring Me Luck Brought Only a Curse

El Mariachi (1992) – Directed by Robert Rodriguez – Starring, Carlos Gallardo, Consuelo Gómez, Peter Marquardt, and Reinol Martínez.

The film that launched Robert Rodriguez’s career still holds up as a tight, focused action movie about a mariachi mistaken for a killer who becomes a killer, first out of self-defense and then out of vengeance.

Carlos Gallardo’s performance as El Mariachi is completely engaging and inviting; he channels a warm honesty through his youthful appearance, able to smile in the brief moments of peace with Domino (Consuelo Gómez), even with all the craziness around him. It’s Mariachi’s openness and generally upbeat persona that carries us through the movie; he comes to town to find work playing his music and thinks this town will bring him luck, but a case of mistaken identity with the thug Azul (Reinol Martínez), who has come to town with a guitar case full of weapons to get his money from Moco (Peter Marquardt), has all of Moco’s killers trying to kill him instead.

I think what’s most impressive about the film is that Rodriguez keeps everything in line; much has been made about the fact that EL MARIACHI was made for only $7,000 which, I’m sure, contributes to this not being as long as Fellowship‘s Extended Cut, but even with all the excessive violence, there’s no wasted action in MARIACHI. One of the big difference between Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino is that despite all they have in common, Rodriguez is primarily about the coolness of the visual while Tarantino favors the spoken word.

Neither would work if they didn’t have good characters, of course, and Rodriguez puts four of them into play in EL MARIACHI. Mariachi’s goodness and earnestness is countered by his guitar-case wielding binary, Azul, a very bad dude who’s running a small operation out of a small jail and biding his time to go after Moco. Where Mariachi has an instrument of love in his case, Azul carries weapons of violence. Where Mariachi is a one-woman man despite his abilities to charm the crowd of ladies who come to watch him play, Azul has three women he lays with at the same time and is all business. Reinol Martínez is fantastic as Azul, playing the baddest guy in the film.

Domino is the woman Mariachi charms and falls for over the course of the film. He meets her when he comes into her saloon to look for a job, and his boyish charm works on her. She allows him to play and allows him to stay in her apartment upstairs. Domino also has a connection with Moco, who’s trying to woo her with gifts. Domino and Mariachi have good chemistry together; he keeps pushing his luck and she keeps pushing back, only to relent. He wants to play in her place, she says no, and then lets him to play despite not being able to play him. She lets him stay upstairs in his pace but when she goes up to check on him, she finds that he’s in her bath, so she pulls a “knife” on him (actually a letter opener) and forces him to play a song to prove he’s actually a mariachi.

Rodriguez does a good job bouncing these four around each other in this small town, blending a soft humor (mostly either from Mariachi or at his expense) with the copious amounts of violence. The story weaves around and around itself until the final confrontation at Moco’s compound. After Moco’s men grab Mariachi, only to have Moco cut him loose, Azul and Domino head to Moco’s place. When Moco finds out that Domino didn’t talk to him because she was with Mariachi, he flips his gourd and kills her, then his men cut down Azul, and then Mariachi arrives again – this time not knocked out in the back of a truck.

Moco shoots a hole through Mariachi’s hand, hindering his ability to ever play the guitar again, so after Mariachi takes out Moco and Moco’s men basically just shrug, Mariachi fills his guitar case with guns, puts Domino’s dog on his back, gets onto Domino’s motorcycle (bought for her by Moco), and drives off into the future. It’s a fitting end – the Mariachi who comes to town looking to ply his trade ends up falling in love with Domino, being mistaken for Azul, and killing Moco ends up leaving the town with a piece of each of them in tow, their identities now fused into his own identity, as if when they died physical deaths a piece of their soul was transferred into Mariachi.

If Nic Cage reads that last sentence, that’s totally his next movie.

EL MARIACHI still holds up as a tremendous modern western, and what Rodriguez proves here is that whether your budget is $7,000 or $270 million, it doesn’t cost an extra nickel to create solid characters or to know where to point your camera. The ending is both tragic and uplifting; the man of music has been transformed into a man of violence but is now filled with a greater sense of purpose, and a stronger desire to meet the world head on.