Star: Danny Trejo

Once Upon A Time in Mexico (2003) – Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek

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.

Driving Prison

Death Race 2 (2010) – Luke Goss, Sean Bean, Ving Rhames and Danny Trejo

This is more of a remake than a sequel. Nothing really continues from the original. It’s not an identical copy, but some particular scenes are pretty much identical (with inferior execution of course).

As expected by the promotional material and the level of the lead cast members, this movie has a considerably cheaper vibe than the original — especially on the cinematography front — but surprisingly the acting is pretty good and the movie does very well at keeping the pace going fast enough to sustain an entertaining vibe. Credit to Luke Goss who performs out of his skin, backed by supporting cast members like Sean Bean, Ving Rhames and Danny Trejo who action fans will be familiar with from other movies and are all about as big & strong in action movie stardom as Luke Goss, if not bigger, so he’s done well to score them in his supporting cast and the producers have done poorly in not making him also just a supporting cast member for someone markedly stronger — maybe they had Statham in mind for Goss’s role here until Statham turned it down.

There are a couple of minor returning characters from the original, although one of them was killed last time round: 14K (meant to be dead) and the nerdy fat white guy who worked in Statham’s car crew.

The cheapness of this movie is telling throughout, but the pace does well to make it tolerable, however when it gets to around an hour in, when the prisoners get acquainted with their vehicles and begin racing and killing each other all in one fast paced long monotonous scene, the cheap & nasty level of this movie really peaks. The original never would have overwhelmed us like that, which only resulted in a kind of boredom due to constant hollow action after a shocking burst of pace. The original would have been much more conscious of momentum and would have considered the execution of this one comically bad. From the start of the second hour it becomes tempting to fast forward through a lot of the hollow action. And although there are a couple of in between scenes and minor plot developments, it pretty much doesn’t let up with the shallow monotonous racing drama from the start of the second hour until the end. The first hour was the good part of the movie, the second is wildly all over the place and has entirely lost focus.

It’s not until the last quarter hour when we learn that this is actually a prequel to the original, since Luke Goss gets burnt to a crisp and becomes the original Frankenstein racer who was already 4 wins in at the start of the original movie. From here, the last 10 minutes are actually pretty good. It’s just a shame we had to sit through (or skip) the previous half an hour — the main course of the movie.

All things considered, I rate this movie So-So — that’s around a couple levels below average, and about 4 clean levels below the original. But it’s not worthless — it’s mostly watchable, and mostly mildly entertaining if you’re terribly bored and have not seen it before or in a long time at least.

Desperado (1995) – Antonio Banderas, Salma Hayek and Steve Buscemi

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.

Western

Desert Heat / Inferno (1999) – Jean-Claude Van Damme

Inferno (also released as Desert Heat) is a simple story exhibiting classic Van Damme, as plays Eddie Lomax, a man ready to die, who rolls into a town called Inferno, somewhere in the Old West, to visit an old friend, an Native American Indian man called Johnny Six Toes, played by Danny Trejo, to deliver him a gift – an Indian motorcycle – and to ask for his blessing in ending his life. Unfortunately, before the gift could be delivered, the bike got stolen and Eddie nearly killed in the process. So Eddie stays in town for a bit longer, to deal with the thieves, and in the process, deals with two large gangs of thugs, while making some good friends and finding a woman he loves.

Van Damme is his usual self, convincing and entertaining in his role as Eddie Lomax, and he’s blessed with a decent script here – it’s no stunner but it’s sufficient for his essence to come out quite well on screen. Van Damme looks consistently cool, and there’s a nice injection of humour from time to time.

Danny Trejo does a decent job as Johnny Six Toes, the Indian man who is Eddie’s old friend. Since Eddie saved Johnny’s life a long time ago, the two have become spiritually joined at the hip.

The lead female role, Rhonda Reynolds, the local diner’s chef who becomes Eddie’s girlfriend by the end, is played by Gabrielle Fitzpatrick – she does a decent job – quite convincing.

We’re also blessed with a strong supporting role played by Pat Morita (better known as Mr Miyagi from The Karate Kid). In this movie he’s getting on a bit, but still does well in the character of a patient, positive & helpful old man.

I would say this movie is slightly above average in Van Damme’s overall filmography. It’s not on the level of Bloodsport or The Quest but is not far behind. He’s in his prime here, and is backed by a decent cast. It’s better than a lot of the cheaper straight-to-video movies he’s made throughout his busy career – most of which are still classics nevertheless.