Review of Desperado (1995) by Kia M — 23 Aug 2013

After the mega success that was 1992's El Mariachi, director Robert Rodriguez entered the Hollywood scene with this sequel (and quasi-remake). He made El Mariachi with a paltry $7,000; Desperado with $7,000,000.

It has the same set-up as its predecessor, this time with Antonio Banderas as the unnamed mariachi, a lone wolf well-equipped with a guitar case full of guns, searching each town he comes across for the crime ring that works for the man who murdered his lover. He gets help from a wacky Steve Buscemi and Carolina (Salma Hayek), a bookstore owner, with whom he falls in love. Rodriguez regular Cheech Marin plays a shady bartender and Quentin Tarantino shows up as an unlucky patron to Marin's bar. Many of these characters are the movie's main sources of comic relief when gunfire isn't filling the screen.

Chock full of bloody action sequences and automatic weapons (Rodriguez loves to use MAC-10's), Desperado never stops a beat to develop its characters or add to the storyline as the mariachi goes from shooting one place up to the next. Yet I enjoyed this film more than I did El Mariachi. It is better shot and edited, the dialogue is more fun, the action more satisfying, and the actors more talented.

Despite still having a few prop inconsistencies (guns will replaced by others in different shots, though this doesn't occur nearly as much as in El Mariachi, where it was more noticeable) and no better a premise than to add revenge, Desperado shows Rodriguez's improvement as a filmmaker and the energetic touches he adds to the revenge/shoot 'em up genre.