"Once Upon a Time in Mexico" is all that its title implies and more: a homage to the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone, especially the epic "Once Upon a Time in the West," with a Latin twist and a little John Woo thrown in for good measure.
But it's also very much a Robert Rodriguez film, or "flick," as he insouciantly calls this picture. "Once Upon a Time in Mexico" is the third and final installment of a trilogy of contemporary westerns that started in 1993 with the release of Rodriguez's first feature, the micro-budgeted "El Mariachi." Since then, the 35-year-old Texan has proven to be one of Hollywood's most creative and successful action directors, consistently hewing to the scrappy, do-it-yourself ethic that gave "El Mariachi" much of its zing and charm. "Desperado" (1995), which was something between a remake and a sequel, boasted an exponentially bigger budget and the burgeoning star Antonio Banderas, but Rodriguez clearly hadn't abandoned the principles of economy, ingenuity and humor that animated his first film; "Desperado" went on to become a cult hit on video.
Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek try to outrun a fireball in "Once Upon a Time in Mexico."
(Rico Torres -- Columbia Pictures)
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Eight years later, fans are understandably panting for the climactic installment of the "Mariachi" cycle; happily for them, "Once Upon a Time in Mexico" proves to be a whiz-bang kick in the pants. Again, Rodriguez effortlessly deploys the rituals and fetishes of the western and action genres -- the blood and bullets, the fire and leather and cleavage -- but always with a sly, self-referential wit. The violence is so stylized that it's virtually abstract; the double-fisted showdowns and near-constant gunplay are so cartoonish that they outpace the flaccid comic-book adaptations that came out earlier this summer.
Indeed, there is always something childlike -- detractors might say arrested -- about Rodriguez's movies, whether in the warm, playful action of the "Spy Kids" franchise or the far more graphic "Mariachi" pictures ("Spy Kids" fans, take note: Leave the youngsters at home for this one). Thus, in "Once Upon a Time in Mexico," a tough guy brings $10,000 to a seedy bar in a child's lunchbox; the film's chief supporting character, a corrupt CIA agent, wears corny T-shirts with slogans like "I'm With Stupid" and "CIA" emblazoned on the front. Welcome to Robert Rodriguez's world: slick, anarchic, larger-than-life and, always, exuberantly irreverent.
"Once Upon a Time in Mexico" finds El Mariachi (Banderas) on yet another quest for revenge. In "Desperado" he was looking for the drug dealer who killed his girlfriend in "El Mariachi," and here, he's hunting down Barillo (Willem Dafoe), who apparently has killed Mariachi's wife (played in flashbacks by Salma Hayek) and daughter. But here, "El," as he is called, is really only a supporting player in a labyrinthine story involving Barillo's plot to assassinate the Mexican president and a counter-plot hatched by CIA Agent Sands, played by Johnny Depp with the cheeky flair he brought to his star turn in "Pirates of the Caribbean."
Admirers of the pure action of "Desperado" will be sated by the set pieces that punctuate "Once Upon a Time in Mexico" with clockwork regularity: As the smolderingly quiet loner, Banderas executes with aplomb a near-silent gunfight in an ornate Mexican church, and a flashback scene with Hayek features a nervy series of stunts that begins with them chained together and swinging out of harm's way like a human Slinky, and ends with -- what else? -- the couple narrowly escaping an encroaching fireball. As always, El Mariachi has some explosive tricks hidden in his guitar case; here, the instruments throw flames and propel themselves like motorized land mines.
But the real star of "Once Upon a Time in Mexico" isn't Banderas, or even the guns, but Depp, who is quickly proving to be the most larcenous man in show business by stealing every movie he's in. As the morally slippery Sands, Depp is at once loathsome and compulsively likable; Sands might ruthlessly dispatch an innocent man for cooking too well, but he's also the kind of guy who rigs a bullfight in favor of the bull. Although he ostensibly hires El to foil the assassination plot, it's never clear which dog he has in what fight. By the time he is horribly blinded by a gruesome plastic surgery operation -- his empty eye sockets dripping viscous blood down a Kabuki mask of blank pain -- you can't help but cheer him as he makes one last, crippled stand for . . . something.
"Once Upon a Time in Mexico" is a busy movie (Ruben Blades, Mickey Rourke, Eva Mendes and Rodriguez rep players Cheech Marin and Danny Trejo all have significant supporting roles), maybe too busy -- there's so much movement and talk and story that it's easy to lose track of what has become of the simple guitar player from a tiny Mexican border town. Still, with its fleet humor and swift, nimble action, it brings a terrifically entertaining cycle of movies to a fitting end, with the guitar-and-gun-slinging hero proving once and for all that revenge may not always be sweet, but it can be very, very cool.
Once Upon a Time in Mexico (121 minutes, at area theaters) is rated R for strong violence and for language.
