The first two movies are very good. El Mariachi might be sort of hard to find - at the very least, it was hard up here. Desperado was a much bigger budget, and a bigger release. Neither was as gory as this latest one, but they’re all violent. They’re action movies.
I liked Once Upon a Time in Mexico probably about as much as I liked the other two. I wasn’t disappointed, certainly. There was a lot of action, and some very funny moments, and Johnny Depp was in it, which is really about all I require.
I loved El Mariachi but this one both sucked and blew. El Mariachi was mindless fun with lots of gun fights and a comprehensible plot. Once Upon a Time has a nonsensical (not to mention preachy and cheesy) plot, cheesy special effects (see super-fake explosion, lame-ass guitar flamethrower), and terrible performances (see Willem Dafoe’s accent, Enrique Iglesias. Johnny Depp was the only salvageable thing about this movie, which is apparently why Rodriguez re-cut it to make him the main character.
I totally agree with all those who said this movie is like a cartoon. Unfortunately the cartoon it reminded me of more than anything was Dick Tracy.
I think that Spy Kids destroyed whatever film-making spirit Rodriguez ever had.
I loved how they got Antonio Banderas and Enriqu Iglesias (Spaniards) to play Mexicans. Banderas wasn’t that bad, but Enrique, damn. “Shomosh Hijosh de Meshico!” heh. But not bad. Fun, harmless movie.
Well…, the guitar case thing was first introduced in Desperado, and of course El’s friends couldn’t just shoot people with guns, that’d be boring as hell. This movie took camp to extremes in a good sense. I thought it was an awesome movie, I left the theatres just thinking about how great it was and why I thought it was so great, but I couldn’t really figure it out, and I still can’t. Part of it was just that it was an awesome action flick, lots of gunfights, bullet-dodging protagonists, people being blown away by shotguns and pistols and the like. It was unrealistic in a fantastic sense, and didn’t portray Banderas or the others as too much of supermen. Of course they didn’t die, but they didn’t exactly waltz through streams of gunfire either.
One problem I did have was that Banderas didn’t do much in the way of acting, but then again, he was to be the stoic in this movie. He’s “already dead”, and has nothing to live for, so how else was he supposed to act?
I didn’t understand why people disliked Enrique Ingelisias so much, I mean, he didn’t do a bad job in the movie. He just said his few lines, shot up some people, and just had fun being on a movie set, at least that’s the way it seemed to me.
Bottom line to me is that this movie seemed like it would have been fun to participate in, it’s fun to watch (except for the gory parts), and on top of all that, it has a pretty damn good story for an action flick, and decent characters. Depp of course does most of the acting and talking, but that makes sense seeing as how he is more or less the focus point of this movie. He is the one who starts things rolling towards the conclusion.
I enjoyed this film, but I thought it to be the weakest of the trilogy. The plot was needlessly complicated (in a Matrix kind of way), and it lacked the humor and the charm of the first two.