Also called The Code in some regions, this movie gets off to a simple TV action-drama style beginning. Not unpleasant, and not boring, but not wowing either. Just a bit average. If it continues at the pace it got going with, it’s set for a Bang Average rating.
By an hour in, this movie has become decent action with a simple but engaging story for a first time viewer. Add to this decent actors, and in a sense it’s a pretty good movie, but the plot is still very thin, the whole movie is very one dimensional and the action is very simplistic — not bad just simplistic — so it looks fixed for a Bang Average rating still, but that’s not a bad score — it puts it level with many semi-dated classics.
The bundle of plot twists at the end made a nice way to round off the movie — just when you thought the story was clear, there were more twists still unfolding, making it eventually quite original in this way.
Despite its star-studded cast, this Desperado sequel is immensely more cheap & boring than the original. After 20 minutes, we’ve already met Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek, as well as new additions in Johnny Depp and Eva Mendes — and we’re soon to meet Enrique Iglesias and see the return of Danny Trejo — but I’m still ready to fast-forward or switch off. Thus far, it looks set for a Below Average rating at best.
It’s also more slapstick than the original, with Salma Hayek being some kind of perfect marksman & combatant all of a sudden.
By the half way mark, it looks set for a Barely Watchable rating. If not for the star-studded cast and the slight continuation of theme from the far superior original movie, this one would warrant an even worse rating, ie Unwatchable. It really is that terribly put together. In this way, this movie is somewhat reminiscent of Ballistic: Ecks vs Sever (2002) — a similarly massive flop Banderas starred in just one year prior to this one, alongside other stars like Lucy Liu and Talisa Soto. Both movies ooze hollow meaningless action void of atmosphere or momentum. Such great actors obviously add charisma in the moment, but they can do nothing to join the dots together without the support of serious cinematography and scriptwork.
In the end, I ended up fast-forwarding through most of the second half of this movie, and I feel like I missed nothing. That’s how bad it is. I could have tolerated watching it properly if I were terribly bored, but I’ve got better things to do so the Barely Watchable rating stands.
This movie gets off to a subtly intriguing start, managing to build a bit of an atmosphere quite well.
Although the first half of the movie is quite creative, the second half doesn’t really develop the plot any further — it’s basically a set of related scenes, in 1 building, the whole way through after the first half hour. The action is frequent but it’s also quite gritty, so all in all I have to rate it Bang Average and if anything that’s a slight over-rating due to the genre being very good even if the plot is gravely lacking.
Although a bit aged, Antonio Banderas pulled off a few of his old Desperado type moves. Ben Kingsley was a convincing baddie – no doubt a psychopath in real life – with vibes of Anton LeVey the satanist. And Cung Le didn’t get much screen time but what he did was to a high standard even by his own standards.
This is a classic — one of very few from the 90s with this genre and level of execution, if not the only one of that combination. Whether it skyrocketed the careers of Banderas, Buscemi, Hayek and Trejo or just highlighted them doesn’t really matter — what matters is they all shined individually and came together to make this a smooth movie with good acting, good action and good cinematography.
For such a simple and (in a way) boring style of opening, it did fantastically to sustain attention, buy you into the characters and lure you into the simple yet intriguing plot.
While there are still interesting scenes as the movie progresses, the density of intrigue dwindles with the odd bit of talkative drama. For this reason, instead of the potentially higher rating that this movie was probably capable of after the first half hour, it seems like it deserves a rating of Decent after the first hour is through.
Joaquim De Almeida does well as the chief baddie. Danny Trejo does well as the main hired gun. Salma Hayek does well as the lead female. Steve Buscemi does great as the lead character’s sidekick although he dies quite early on. And of course Antonio Banderas does great as the main star of the movie.
It seemed like it was losing steam with about half an hour to go, but a couple of interesting plot twists kept us on our toes and made it continually quite watchable.
Considering the balance of its dated simplicity vs its intrinsic strengths, I rate this movie Pretty Good – just 2 or 3 levels shy of the best action hero movies of all time.
Sequel
If you enjoyed this movie, you may wish to check out its sequel — Once Upon A Time in Mexico (2003) — although that sequel is countless levels weaker than the original — it’s Barely Watchable for me — so you might be disappointed.
Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones return — they’re both pretty good actors. Banderas is especially good, given the right role, and this one fits quite well at times.
Rufus Sewell is impressive as the main antagonist here.
Adrian Alonso does alright as Zorro’s son too.
Inkeeping with the original, the actions scenes in this one are a bit slapstick and feature classical music similar to Indiana Jones in terms of notes and insruments but wildly disorganised and unharmonious in comparison. The action is a bit hollow and longwinded early on too, once they get into the swordfighting which is weird since this is gun country. Fortunately it’s over after a few dull minutes, then we get a nice stunt and a bit of humour and a bit of plot.
Although this movie is a bit one dimensional, it still has decent acting, script and general screenplay, so I give it a Bang Average rating, which is not bad — only one step down from the original — although this one would probably be rated slighly lower still, if viewed in isolation, since much of the entertainment value stems here from it being a follow-on to the story of the original.
The ending is not terrible except for the constant loud and annoying uncoordinated noise which lasts for at least 10 minutes during the battle scene near the end. Highly fast-forwardable. And after that, there’s a longwinded mushy bit of boring drama — also highly skippable.
Anthony Hopkins plays an old Zorro here, and Antonio Banderas plays the new one who Hopkins trains. Catherine Zeta-Jones stars as the lead female and while neither Banderas nor Hopkins are quite like Sean Connery, and Catherine isn’t the one being trained up here, I feel like this movie still somewhat inspired Catherine’s duet with Sean Connery in Entrapment the following year.
This movie features some slightly nice training scenes although they don’t last long. It’s got nothing on Kickboxer or No Retreat No Surrender in that department.
The action is not bad in this movie although it’s a bit slapstick.
Although it can be a bit slow at times, the plot generally unfolds quite well to keep us intrigued and engaged with the help of high quality acting and screenplay too.
Overall I rate this movie Above Average since it’s got a good amount of goodness but hardly to an outstanding level and it’s quite diluted by the length of the movie.
The classical music in the battle scene near the end is reminiscent of Indiana Jones, just without the rhythm — it’s a bit random & messy but using similar notes & instruments.
If you loved this movie, you’ll be pleased to know there’s a sequel — Legend Of Zorro (2005) — which sees the return of Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones.
Upon seeing the stars, and seeing genre, and seeing how this movie won awards for being so bad, I couldn’t help but think critics must have been over-reacting. Maybe they’re not real action fans, I thought. Then I saw it for myself, or at least as much as I could tolerate. Not that I didn’t like the actors, or the genre, but it’s like one big acid trip. It’s like nobody’s doing thir job. It’s like everyone’s on something, and not really trying to make a good movie. I feel like I’m wasting my time watching this stuff. It’s so bad, I had to stop early. Very early. Like barely more than 20 minutes in. I skipped ahead to see if anything seemed to be improving, and it didn’t; so as much as I’m a huge fan of Antonio Banderas and Talisa Soto, and don’t mind a bit of Lucy Liu either, I simply couldn’t force myself to watch this tripe, it’s a waste of my life – well, most movies are, but this one particularly stands out in that regard.
Not that everything about this movie is bad, because there are some good attributes here and there. But the vast majority of the script, the acting, the sound, the integrated cinematography, the general atmospherics & momentum, the screen combat, and pretty much anything else I can think of, is like something you might expect from a college kids’ assignment. Minus a faint whiff of proper stuff here & there, particularly in how it’s packaged; it’s basically a B movie, and I don’t watch B movies. Well, it’s not a B movie per say, but it’s just as bad as one. I rate it Barely Watchable. That’s not to say you can’t watch it at all – it’s just to say I can’t watch it unless I’m utterly bored to the maximum. For once, I agree with the mainstream movie critics. It’s as if this movie was made as an April Fools prank. Roll up, roll up, there’s a respectable action movie here. Gotchya! Maybe some of the actors were pranked into being involved too. It really is that bad. Even the title is a mess – it sounds like it’s a sequel to something but it isn’t – it was just released to co-incide with the release of a computer game by the same name, which itself was a sequel to an earlier version of that game called (Ecks vs Sever). The game itself was a big hit for Game Boy Advance consoles, even if the movie itself is unanimously deemed one of the worst movies ever made in its genre at that budget level.
How on earth could it have a $70 million budget and end up like this? I guess it was generously sponsored to promote the game, then made in a hurry with cost cutting and money laundering.
Other action movies made in 2002 include Equilibrium and The Transporter – both awesome movies, on budgets of only $20 million and $21 million respectively. 2002 also saw the release of The Count of Monte Cristo which wasn’t so heavy on the action and didn’t have such big names but was a seiously captivating movie nevertheless, on a budget of $35 million. When you up the budget further, you get movies like The Scorpion King on $60 million starring The Rock, and The Bourne Identity on $60 million starring Matt Damon which spawned a massive 5-movie franchise.
There were also some super massive action movies in 2002, including Spider-Man and Star Wars: Episide II both boasting budgets in excess of $100 million. But $70 million is still a very serious budget so it’s quite shocking just how badly this movie turned out to be in practically every department.
Honestly, before looking it up, I was thinking maybe some spoilt rich kid was treated to the opportunity to direct a movie with such stars as Banderas, Liu and Soto involved. After looking it up, it turns out the reality isn’t terribly far from this theory. It was produced & directed by Wych Kaosayananda (under the alias Kaos) – he’s the son of a politican, who hadn’t directed any English movies before (only one Thai movie called Fah, 1998), and after this he took a 10 year break from the movie business altogether (to learn his craft perhaps?) but to his credit, he came back with some moderately respectable movies such as Tekken 2 (another computer game adaptation) which was a slight flop but was still more than watchable – I quite enjoyed it, as a former Tekken game enthusiast, even though it veered massively off-genre compared to the original Tekken movie and what would be expected of any film adaptation.
This movie gets off to a good start, with intriguing action at a good pace – unfortunately this is let down by the fact it’s mainly in German so you’ll need good subtitles to follow what’s being said.
Harrison Food looks fantastically young in the first 20 minutes, considering he’s about 80 years old here – he could easily pass for 50. He looks younger than his last outing, which was about 15 years prior. So I guess he’s wearing heavy makeup and/or there’s some kind of AI based reverse-ageing filter going on here. After 20 minutes, the scene changes to a later timeframe, and Harrison Ford looks more like his real age now.
The movie then creeps into increasing levels of tedium, until the 80 year old man starts running from a team of armed mercenaries and somehow successfully throws obstacles in their way and evades them for some time. This of course is cringeworthily unconvincing compared to when he was doing it as a much younger man. It’s getting hard to watch now.
New cast members in this movie include Shaunette Renée Wilson who in this movie looks & moves like she could be a daughter of Samuel L Jackson but apparently is not. Maybe her makeup has something to do with it.
An hour into the movie, when 80-year-old Indiana has finished fist-fighting and running around with in-prime mercenaries, we meet a Moroccan gangster so feared that the local police lower their guns and drive off. Then he opens his mouth, and we hear an Eton-schooled politician-style snotty London accent. His accent then gradually sinks into something more foreign & husky, as if we didn’t hear his opening few lines already. Sack the director please. That’s no minor faux pas. And while you’re at it, sack the writer too. Harrison Ford is way too old for this script, he should be far more reserved, and giving some new young gun the opportunity to do the bulk of the running around and fighting. Honestly this movie is like a circus in giving Ford this kind of physical work, and it’s really not necessary – he could be acting a more senior character and doing the physical stuff more sparingly and more realistically without compromising on quality so far as traditional Indiana Jones fans are concerned. After this would-be-scary little chat, Indy then runs away on foot, hobbling along as if he’s got broken ankles or is walking in quicksand, while somehow still out-running cars & motorbikes and dodging bullets too…
Half way through, we’re introduced to a character played by Antonio Banderas in his early 60s. This movie is desperately in need of some young blood.
Ford has a very croaky voice in this movie, as if he’s not got long left to live.
The lead female (with quite an Adam’s Apple) is played rather deviously by Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Her character is fun yet nonchalant, and a bit mischievous, as if she’s just playing a cheeky game while being shot at and everything else. With her big nose, big chin, mischievous unsympathetic gaze and androgynous bony figure, she could make a convincing witch, but a benevolent character is a hard sell for her.
Interesting plot twist towards the end. Fascinating concept and potential for some awesome action, but unfortunately we get pretty much no action from it, only a load of mostly-static drama. As for the very very end, I found myself fast forwarding the last minute of the movie – how bad does a movie have to get for that to happen? It was just a very clearly dead drama scene going nowhere except a bit of friction and cringeworthy affection between two very elderly people.
This has got to be the worst movie in the saga, without question. So much that I’m going to rate it Barely Watchable but not quite on the level of OK like all the others were.
Action Hero Movies
