Once Upon a Time in Mexico - SPOILERS

Cafe Society
1

We just returned from Once Upon a Time in Mexico and I’m more than a bit confused. The plot is so damn convoluted with double-double-crosses that I just didn’t “get” it.

Johnny Depp’s character is supposedly CIA and is orchestrating the overthrow of the Mexican president and kill the leader of the new regime as well. He hires Antonio Bandaras’s character (El Mariachi) to kill the leader of the new regime after he’s killed the President.

That’s as far as I understood. There are several other characters that are introduced as friends only to discover they are foes and vice versa. My head is swimming.

Can anyone give me the Reader’s Digest version or the Cliff’s Notes?

2

“I have no idea what just happened, but I know it kicked my ass.” –Juniper200, as the lights came up in the movie theater

::deep breath::

Johnny Depp learns that Willem Dafoe wants to overthrow the Mexican government and install a general left over from the last movie as the leader of the new regime. The general and his guys will be paid all kinds of money for doing this, and Johnny Depp figures he can allow the assassination, have General Leftovers killed and then take the money himself and blow town with the hot chick from the Mexican FBI equilvelant that he’s been sleeping with on the side.

So. Johnny calls Cheech for a lead on someone who’ll kill the General. Cheech is all, “Antonio Banderas is your man here. He kicks ass.” And Johnny is all, “Then by all means, Antonio Banderas is the man I shall have.” He sends guys to get Antonio, who noodles constantly on the guitar like that kid you hated in the college dorm. At some point, Cheech is shot and references to skullfucking are made. I think that’s just a fun word.

::pause for heavy drinking::

Antonio agrees to kill General Leftovers, as the General killed Salma Hayek and their mutual moppet in a flashback. Meanwhile, Johnny Depp finds an ex-FBI guy he knows and sets him in motion to mess with Willem Dafoe and his gang. Ex-FBI guy used to have a partner, and Willem had him tortured and killed. I have no idea why Johnny wants Willem taken down, unless it’s just to keep Willem from hunting him down after he takes the money and runs after the assassination(s).

Willem, in what was probably the most bizarre casting call ever, finds a guy with similar bone structure and hires him to fill in as a body double, because Willem has gotten wind of the whole plan from Hot FBI-Equilvilant Chick, who is his daughter. A guy in Willem’s inner circle turns out to be very much wanted by the ex-FBI Guy, and, thinking FBI Guy is still active in the bureau, agrees to help FBI Guy kill Willem Dafoe.

I have no idea why Enrique Iglecias or his mole are in this movie.

::more heavy drinking, possible cocaine use::

Assassination Day rolls around. Willem goes in for plastic surgery, a step his agent advised years ago. FBI Guy seizes this as his opportunity to kill Willem dead, so he runs upstairs in the hospital and kills some doctors. He finds a guy with a peeled face and assumes it to be Willem, but then he figures out it’s the body double. Then Hot FBI-Equivilant Chick moves in with her dad’s men, and they take FBI Guy prisoner.

The Wanted-By-The-FBI inner circle man is killed. I don’t know why he was in the movie, either.

Meanwhile, Johnny Depp has also been played by the HFBI-EC, and her dad’s guys gouge out his eyes, presumably because they didn’t like the whole eyeliner thing in Pirates of the Caribbean.

Antonio Banderas kills General Leftovers, but he does so after saving the president, thus thwarting Johnny in every way possible. Because meanwhile, the humble citizens of Mexico have fought off a military coup involving tanks.

::deep breath to calm shakes as we enter the home stretch::

Johnny, eyeless and bloody, uses his Spidey Sense to kill a bunch of guys and the HFBI-EC anyway, but the price of such amazing power is that he has to adopt his own Short Round. Willem gets killed by either Antonio Banderas or the FBI Guy, I forget which, and I don’t think it matters.

Johnny Depp lives; FBI Guy is satisfied; Enrique and Some Other Guy have lots of money; Antonio Banderas has a guitar and he won’t shut up with it.

Hope this helps!

::collapse::

3

Wow.

Thank-you, Juniper200. That was an awesome post!

I saw it two weeks ago, and there was enough that was funny and/or cool that it didn’t matter if I understood all the intracacies of the plot or not.

Aside for you leaving out the “fake arm” bit, I think this was the most excellent and amusing plot description I’ve ever read.

4

Juniper2000
A well-written and forthright presentation of what sounds like a complete and utter mess. Thank you for saving me 7 bucks and a couple of hours.

5

Eeeellll Presideeeeeeeeente!!!

:wink:
I thought the movie was crap.

6

My partner liked it. I didn’t.

Maybe because I didn’t see the first two; El Mariachi and whatever the other one was called. No, that couldn’t be it. My partner didn’t see those two either.

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I enjoyed it, because it was a guilty pleasure movie, and Johnny Depp’s character was great. The one issue I really had with it though…he shoots the big bad in the head TWICE with a sawed off shotgun, and the guy still had a head left? BAH!!

Overall, it was fun, and Cheech and Johnny had a lot of great moments.

“You wouldn’t kill me for ten grand.”

<whispering> “Yes I would…”

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Juniper200, all I can say is…

Wow! and Thank You!

No wonder I left the theater exhausted. :wink:

Part of the problem as I see it now is that I had no clue that there were two prior movies leading up to this one. I’m tempted to now watch them all in reverse order just for spite.

9

Excellent post! My only question: did FBI man really kill the doctors? I thought Willem Defoe’s men, dressed as Mexican-equivalent FBI agents, did the killin’, and were trying to meake it look like MEFBI had raided the hospital to catch Defoe.

Daniel

10

Holy Ned!

I couldn’t even get through Juniper200’s post.
There’s no way I could sit through the movie.

11

The movie had every single action movie cliche in it as if Rodriguez had a check list and was just ticking them off. If Johnny Depp hadn’t been in it, I would have attacked the screen and torn it to bits just to stop the agony for everyone in the theater.

Since the title says spoilers I won’t use a box, but major SPOILER ahead.

At the end of the movie, Depp, even though blind, is waving around two guns and killing everything in “sight”. (Juniper200, loved the bit about the Spidey sense. That’s how far out the movie got.) We see him and his entire body in full view.

After he has taken sufficient rounds to kill him, he is lying in the middle of the street. Nobody comes near him. But somehow, he is now wearing his fake left arm so that he can gun down the ex-FBI Lady he didn’t know was coming.

Where the freakin’ pulled pork sandwich did the arm come from?

12

I loved El Mariachi and Desperado, both kicked ass. This one…meh. Johnny Depp was great (with the exception of the aforementioned never-before-revealed superpowers).

Besides the fact that he carries a guitar and we’re told it is, I can’t see how this movie can relate to the previous movies at all. I’m going to have to review my DVDs, but I don’t recall General Leftover in either film at all.

All in all, it didn’t do much for me at all.

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Daniel, I think you are right. IIRC, when one of the “doctors” was escaping, he and the MEFBI all rounded a corner and got in the same black sedan that the MEFBI arrived in.

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Oh, I also forgot. We noticed two major boo-boos.
ul In the first scene where Johnny Depp met the young boy on the street selling gum, the editors flipped the film backwards so that the lettering was backwards.

(2) In the closing credits, one of the credits was for a cosutmer.[/ul]
Such mistakes surprised me in such a star-laden movie.

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For the record, I really did like the movie a great deal; I’ll probably get the DVD. I just felt like I’d been force-fed some mescaline at the door while Robert Rodriguez screamed, “Come on! We’re taking this theater to the moon!!”

Yeah, you’re right about the MEFBI and the doctors; I’ve only seen the movie the one time, and that was on the 14th.

I didn’t stay through the credits, not realizing there was a bit tacked on the end. Can someone describe it? I know it was Agent Sands-related.

16

Did it seem to anyone else that the eyeless Johnny Depp was sort of channeling The Crow?

17

This was definitely a guilty pleasure movie. Live-action comic book all the way. Can’t understand the critics who took it seriously. Johnny Depp was cooler than cool. Great pointless, mindless escapism.

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I stayed for all of the credits, Juniper200. The only thing after the end credits was a close-up of an eyeless Johnny Depp donning his sunglasses.

19

According to HBO’s making of Once Upon a Time in Mexico, This is in someway part 4 of the series. So General Leftover was probably in the film that wasn’t made.

20

Are you sure about that? I’ve always heard that from the beginning, the story was supposed to be a trilogy.

As for Johnny Depp’s “Spidey Sense”, I didn’t find it all that ridiculous. I mean, yeah, it was silly, and I was expecting him to just gun everyone down right off the bat, but all he did was fire off some random shots so he could get the guys to make noise, and then shot in the direction of the sounds. Nothing really new, and they did a pretty good job of drilling that point home. Close up on the foot stepping on the cobbles, he shoots the foot; close up of guy screaming, he shoots the guy in the head. Now, if when he just started shooting right off the bat and killed them perfectly, that would have been way too silly. But the way they pulled it off, just helped drive home what a bad ass he was.

As for the fake arm…eh, he was lying there for a good long while, maybe the kid gave it to him while no one was looking. plus, he seemed to be a good judge of character and good at predicting people’s moves, so he probably knew that if the chick saw him, she’d come by to goad him more…he was just being patient and biding his time. But yeah, overall it was just a little bit of “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if…” Still, it was a fun movie, and I think it fit in well with the other two.