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Once Upon a Time in Mexico


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Posted

Just saw the commercial today. Guess who plays the Mariachi? Johnny Depp. This should be interesting. I freaked when I saw him whip the two glocks from behind him on TV... I loved Desperado, its a classic to me.

 

**strike that, Johnny's not playing the Mariachi. He's the antagonist in the story.**

Posted

Look at this:

 

The saga of the mythic guitar-slinging hero, El Mariachi (Antonio Banderas), continues in Robert Rodriguez’s bold, non-stop action epic ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO.

 

The new adventure is set against a backdrop of revolution and greed. Haunted and scarred by loss, El Mariachi (Banderas) has retreated into a life of isolation. He is forced out of hiding by Sands (Johnny Depp), a corrupt CIA agent. Sands recruits the reclusive hero to sabotage a plot by the evil cartel kingpin Barillo (Willem Dafoe), who is planning to assassinate the president of Mexico. El Mariachi has his own reasons for returning – retribution and revenge.

 

Now, together with his capable cohorts Lorenzo (Enrique Iglesias) and Fideo (Marco Leonardi) the legend of El Mariachi attains new levels of excitement.

 

Antonio Banderas

 

Salma Hayek

 

Johnny Depp

 

Mickey Rourke

 

Eva Mendes

 

Danny Trejo

 

Enrique Iglesias

 

Marco Leonardi

 

Cheech Marin

 

with Rubén Blades

 

and Willem Dafoe

Posted

Hey, didn't Cheech Marin and Danny Trejo get killed in the first one? And Lorenzo and Fideo look and act a lot like Campa and Quino from the first movie. How many trick-guitar case carrying gunslinging friends does El Mariachi have?

 

But other than those little question marks, the movie looks badass.

Posted

Actually, I heard someone suggest that it's an homage to Sergio Leone (as is the title, and much of all three movies) because Leone often used the same actors as different characters in sequels. Seemed resonable enough of an excuse to me.

Posted

I was reading an article on it and it was Tarantino that suggested the whole "Once Upon a Time in Mexico" thing. There was also a part where Rodriguez was saying that

 

SPOILER -at least I think it is...-

 

Depp gets shot in the eye and when he was editing it together, he edited the scene where he gets his eye shot out and put a voice over saying "The Man with no Eyes is back in Once Upon a Time in Mexico 2" and supposedly Depp said he'd love to do a blind-gunfighter flick.

 

END OF SPOILER -if it ever really was...-

  • 4 weeks later...
Posted

I just got back from watchin and all I can say is thats it, fuck Robert Rodriguez. This son of a bitch owes me 14 dollars. First Spy Kids 3 and now this? What the hell happened to this guy? Give him a real budget and his movies fucking suck. Umm, as you can tell, I didn't really like Once Upon a Time in Mexico. The action scenes were bigger but sure as hell were not better, the story was probably the most bloated, incoherent fucking thing I've ever experienced as a film-goer, and yes, Johnny Depp is cool, but no, he doesn't Steal the show. There is no show to steal. He does great here, and has a cool character that maybe they should make a real movie out of one day. But Depp can only carry a movie if they let him (like pirates of the caribbean). I don't even know where to start. Ok, we'll talk about wonder-boy Rodriguez's directing. What happened to this guy? They give him a budget and he goes from a badass young talent to a film student on crack. The camera doesn't stop moving once in this movie, and when i say moving, I mean like the cameraman has to run laps around Banderas's head while he speaks. Style is one thing, but this movie was just fucking incoherent and tiring. If there was a good story in here the randomly chaotic direction would have spoiled it anyways.

 

Speaking of stories, this movie has about 600 or so. The script is all over the place like a blind man with parkinson's disease at a shooting range. Now, I know that good action movies don't require good plots, but there's a difference between a simple plot that's only there to give you action scenes and a plot that just tries to be 2000 things at once and just ends up confusing the fuck out of you. Rodriguez needs to learn that a movie doesn't have twenty characters and a dozen subplots to be epic.

 

Which brings us to the action. All I can say about the action scenes is "Huh?" Yeah, I remember back in the good ole days Rodriguez used to choreograph his action, yeah, and it was all shot really well, and you could see what was going on and stuff... those were the days.... These action scenes might have been choreographed, the truth is, I didn't fuckin see em! Here's a decent

example of an action scene fron Once upon a Time in Mexico:

"Close up of gun

Close up of Bandaras' face

close up of guy flying through the air

close up of some other character I didn't even know was in this fight

close up of gun

close up of gun

close up of small dog

close up of gun

I think you get it. Rodriguez zooms out to actually show us the action maybe twice in the whole movie. And yeah, there's a great ensemble cast, for all it's worth. Depp's character is cool, Banderas does what he does, Dafoe is in it for a little while but he has one of the most incomprehensible parts of the story, so he doesn't get much of a chance to do anything, and it kind of goes on like that

An actor can't do anything if you put em in the movie for 15 minutes and don't give em any decent scenes.

 

Oh, and apparently the reviews for this thing are good? What the fuck? I really don't understand. Johnny Depp was cool, but he couldn't carry the whole thing, noone can dare tell me that they understood or liked the plot, and the action was just not fun or exciting. Maybe if I didn't have somewhat high expectations for this one I wouldn't have HATED it, there were a few cool parts here and there, but as it stands, I left the theater realy fuckin dissapointed.

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