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Once Upon a Time in Mexico

By John Anderson | STAFF WRITER

September 12, 2003

Antonio Banderas returns as "El Mariachi" opposite Salma Hayek in Robert Rodriguez's action adventure "Once Upon a Time in Mexico," opening Sept. 12. (Columbia Pictures)

ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO (R). And once is just about enough: The return (again) of Robert Rodriguez's guitar-slinging El Mariachi, this time with a political conscience and too much time on his hands. Starts off great. By the end, you're wondering if everyone lost interest, or if it's just you. With Johnny Depp, Antonio Banderas, Salma Hayek, Eva Mendes, Mickey Rourke, Willem Dafoe, Danny Trejo, Cheech Marin. Written and directed by Robert Rodriguez. 1:41 (gore, violence, vulgarity, adult situations). At area theaters.

So you're in this Mexican restaurant and they bring you the Salma Hayek of nacho platters. The cheese is all melty and glistening. The half- moons of jalapeño are smiling at the damage they're going to do. The beans are bubbly. The chips are crisp.

And then you look outside and they're towing your car.

What you find upon your return is not melty, smiley or crunchy but clammy, cold and rubberized. It's sort of that way with "Once Upon a Time in Mexico," a movie that goes so wrong so abruptly it's as if a meteor were heading for the set and everyone had to evacuate.

"Shot, chopped and scored" by Robert Rodriquez ("Spy Kids"), "Once Upon a Time in Mexico" is a movie populated by nothing but supporting players - the result of a byzantine plotline, which one supposes is an homage to the equally convoluted '60s spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone (from whose "Once Upon a Time in the West" Rodriguez also gets his title). If there's a star of the film, it's Johnny Depp, who's having a great year: As CIA agent Sands, Depp proves, as he did in "Pirates of the Caribbean," that he has great sense of comedic timing, as well as a great sense of swagger.

But he's also helped by the fact that his coolly calculating Sands works as such an effective counteragent to the sense of overheated epic that Rodriguez brings so successfully to so much of the movie. It works well, while it works, making Depp's contribution all the funnier for the bracing way he brings things back to earth.

The key figure in all this is ostensibly El Mariachi, which shouldn't surprise anyone who has followed Rodriguez's career. ("We call him El," says the grim-faced Danny Trejo, "as in 'the.'" "I know what it means," Depp says.) The title character of Rodriguez's first feature, and the key character in his followup, "Desperado," El is for the second time being played by Antonio Banderas. But like Salma Hayek - another "Desperado" returnee - he's more accessory than center. (Despite her prominence in the print ads, Hayek is in the movie all of 10 minutes, and all of that flashback.) Banderas is a moody, magnetic star but underused, at least by Rodriguez.

His El, the proverbial lone wolf of the West, is running away from a tragic past, until Sands enlists him to foil an assassination on the president of Mexico (Pedro Armendariz). It gets a bit thick, but Barillo (Willem Dafoe) has hired the evil Gen. Marquez (Gerardo Vigil) to kill the prez, because the country's becoming unsafe for drug dealers. Why the evil Sands wants to thwart Barillo is a bit unclear and actually puts him on the same side as El. But it's like "The Big Sleep": If you're worried about the storyline, you're missing the point.

And the point is style, laughs and a sense of genre parody that keeps "Once Upon a Time in Mexico" aloft for a long time. Unfortunately, Rodriguez, who edits his own films, does a sloppy job. There are shots that are simply meaningless; the storyline, knotty enough, is made more baroque by useless scenes and characters (such as El's pair of inane sidekicks). And then, as if heading for the last refuge of an exhausted screenwriter, Rodriguez turns the film into some kind of anthem of Mexican patriotism, which comes out of nowhere and goes there just as quickly.

The experience of "Once Upon a Time in Mexico" is sad, actually, because it starts with such promise, big laughs and a big sense of fun. You could, of course, watch the first half and leave. Go get some nachos. But watch your car.