Depp is numero uno in OUATIM
Just as there are some sports teams you watch for the brilliant efforts of one star athlete, there are movies that rivet your attention when one performer is onscreen and go slack when he's gone.
In "Once Upon a Time in Mexico" (as in this summer's "Pirates of the Caribbean"), Johnny Depp is the MVP, the man, the franchise. When he is onscreen as Agent Sands, a dirty, lowdown, double-crossing CIA op, the film pulsates with startling, subversive wit. He's a snake who would blow you away for rattling your pocket change, yet he's so completely amoral and duplicitous that he becomes strangely lovable.
Between his scenes, the film is about as crisp as last Tuesday's taco.
"Once Upon a Time in Mexico" is the final chapter in the tongue-in-cheek action trilogy by writer/director/jack-of-all-trades Robert Rodriguez.
Rodriguez, whose $7,000 shot-on-video debut feature established him as a kind
of garage-band John Woo, favors hyperactive chases, getaways and firefights
held together by loose, comic-book story lines. His hero, the guitarist and
gunslinger known only as El Mariachi (Antonio Banderas), is the scourge of powerful
evildoers south of the border. That means he's gunning for Barillo (Willem Dafoe,
totally unconvincing in a dark dye job), a drug lord with an inexhaustible supply
of henchmen who can be blown away in colorful and inventive ways.
Rodriguez has drawn favorable attention for his fast, cheap and unpretentious filmmaking; but his reputation as a prodigy might be going to his head. The credits note that he wrote, directed, "shot, chopped and scored" this movie, which comes hot on the heels of his third "Spy Kids."
The movie feels chaotic and hastily slapped together, as if his attention was divided in too many directions. In every regard, it's a step down from 1995's "Desperado," which established El Mariachi as a Latin James Bond with a zany sense of humor. I particularly cherish the moment in the earlier film when, in the middle of a blood-drenched bar shootout, he yelled, "You missed me!"
There's some ingenious stunt choreography in "Once Upon a Time in Mexico." Banderas and Salma Hayek swinging on a chain outside a high window in one scene is a model of adrenalizing action. But the inspiration sputters out in the screenplay, an episodic jumble of underdeveloped characters hatching and foiling plots to overthrow the Mexican president.
El Mariachi has retreated into a life of isolation to lick his wounds, but
is pressed back into action against cartel kingpin Barillo by the cynical Sands,
"because frankly you have nothing left to live for." Then there's
Rubén Blades as a former FBI agent provoked into a plot, Eva Mendes as
an active FBI
agent with her own agenda and Mickey Rourke as a Chihuahua-stroking crook for
hire. How they're all mixed up in the mazelike coup plot is anyone's guess,
and the jumble diminishes even the usually impressive Banderas' presence.
Still, there is Depp as the cool, triple-crossing Agent Sands, an arrogant gringo who says, "Mexico's my beat, and I'm walking it."
Sands thinks so little of the locals that he wears novelty T-shirts with "CIA"
on the chest. What better way to hide than in plain sight, right? He rises in
importance as the film progresses, advancing from a supporting character to
a seemingly indestructible avenger.
If there's another action series in Rodriguez's future, Sands would make a fabulous antihero