LogFAQs > #957373388

Inviso: This was just a chaotic mess of betrayals and wacky, over-the-top characters. And thats right up my alley when it comes to enjoying a film. Seriously, I could just leave the write-up at that, but it would feel like doing the film a disservice. Lets recap: the main villain is Willem DeFoe in brownface, as a psychotic drug lord who insists on having his piano teachers fingers chopped off after an errant joke from Mickey Rourke. I should point out that Mickey Rourke is an American ex-pat who wanders around with a chihuahua at all times. Johnny Depp is a crazy FBI agent with an itchy trigger finger and a penchant for scheming and plotting, who winds up blinded and forced to rely on his sense of hearing to win multiple gunfights. Antonio Banderas is great as always, with a new team of mariachis helping him prevent a coup against the Mexican president. And all of this takes place as multiple sides are attempting to gain power over one another, inserting moles into each others plans. Its great fun across the board.

CoolCly: I strongly dislike it when a movie sets up characters and relationships between them, but then in the sequel one of them is killed off between movies or in the opening act, to create stakes, give the main character a loss to mourn, and/or to drive the main character to revenge.
It's extremely lazy and destroys my ability to respect the films stakes and relationships going forward. People often claim that when characters dont seem to die it hurts stakes, but IMO this is much worse and disrespectful to the audience. Its especially dumb because his motivation in Desperado was revenge over the girl in El Mariachi so they are just doing that again.
The Mariachi bros existing at all is just absurd but whatever, they are even cooler than the bros in Desperado. This continues the trend of these movies just redoing the earlier movies but better

I liked Sands a lot. It seems like he was going to kill that eyepatch guy at the beginning just to keep his money but then didn't after getting called out for it and gives that childish I would. But then kills a chef later for basically no reason (though he believes he has one). He's an interesting guy, very manipulative. And seems very dangerous. His look after the, uh, procedure was pretty striking, and seeing him try to daredevil his way to victory was great. Then when he lost his eyes and achieved true Johnny Depp Style is when I realized that's who he was Overall, he drove the plot in this movie to be a lot more complex and interesting than the plot of El Mariachi / Desperado.
I think Desperado embraced its cheese and had better fight scenes to give it the edge over this movie though. This had lot more turns in the plot and a much more expanded cast, but I just did not connect with the Mariachi himself thanks to it being so based around the wife being killed.
This is a Mexican crime drama though, not a western. Don't agree with it being in this list.

7/10

KBM: Probably a slightly better overall movie than its predecessor El Mariachi (potential list spoilers there, depending on how these fall!), I still have to give the slight edge to the former film if only for sheer low-budget gumption. This may be one of Johnny Depp's best performances of his career, and that IS saying something. It's also refreshing in that unlike Desperado, it goes new places with the story and characters involved than just being a rehash of El Mariachi. And since it's less repetitive than that second installment, and there's much more going on plot-wise, it ends up the much more engaging watch.

Johnbobb: Robert Rodriguez is almost at the point I want him to be here. This film is all sorts of goofy and over-the-top in a way that doesn't ever really take itself seriously, but is almost always entertaining to some extent. It stopped caring all that much about its main character, but for what it's worth, I'm okay with that, as it was more fun to watch a blind Johnny Depp make his way through a battlefield while a kid calls out where his enemies are (were we supposed to be on his side though? Because it acted like he was the hero at the end when he definitely wasn't).

Karo: More mariachi madness, albeit less silly than the other movies. Comparatively. Someone is killed with a remote controlled guitar case bomb so take that as you will.
So apparently his family that he now has was murdered by this general who they were fighting for some reason, or at least that is the best that can be gleaned from how scenes are bizarrely edited together in a way that is both confusing and disruptive to the movie's flow. Dude you arent Quentin Tarantino so stop trying to be his bargain bin mexican knockoff.
The one saving grace to the film is Johnny Depp's eccentric CIA agent, whose personality was thankfully largely created by Depp himself, because Rodriguez has shown again and again he can't create compelling characters to save his life.
Otherwise, it is just an overblown mess with too many plots, too many weird slow motion filters, and way too little time spent on writing the script.

Poke: Not a fan of the over-the-top action flicks and D-grade storylines. I just dont care about the characters.
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Bear Bro
The Empire of Silence