Salma Hayek – Action Hero Movies

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 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.