The first film in the trilogy, El Mariachi, was made in 1992, starred no one you've ever heard of and was produced independently in Mexico for the ridiculously-low cost of about $7000. It looked infinitely better than you'd think it could for the money though, and was successful enough to get Rodriguez a foot in the door in Hollywood. He made the sequel, Desperado, in 1995 with a budget about 1000x higher. It's not a bad movie, as I said in my review a couple of months ago, and it's flashy and fun and very well photographed, but the lack of any sort of actual narrative pull or cohesive story kept me from really recommending it.

How does the third film in the trilogy, made with major stars and for about $30m hold up? To the scores, which are explained here.)

Once Upon A Time In Mexico
Script/Story: 4
Acting/Casting: 7
Action: 6
Humor: 7
Eye Candy: 7
Fun Factor: 5
Replayability: 3
Overall: 6

It's an easy comment to make, but Once Upon a Time in Mexico is basically just Desperado redone, with the benefits of a much large budget, but even less of a worthwhile story. It's got bigger special effects, more characters, lots more dialogue, more locations, lots of extras with machine guns, and so on, but it still has no story to pull you along and no characters for you to really care about. It's pretty, it's frequently inventive, and Johnny Depp's character has a lot of funny, quirky lines, but it's basically boring.

Malaya and me were checking the time as we watched the DVD, and about 45 minutes in she got up and looked at the back of the DVD package. I knew she was checking the running time even without her saying, and when she told me the movie was 105 minutes long, we both sort of sighed. There's nothing in the movie that really sucks, and lots of the individual scenes and moments and exchanges are entertaining, but it's never even slightly involving. You look at the pretty actors and explosions and wish there were more action since then at least something would be happening, while wondering how a movie can have like 10 main characters with speaking roles while still being so static.

The plot, such as it is, features an imminent coup d'etat in Mexico led by an evil army general who murdered El Mariachi's wife and daughter in flashback scenes that took place between this film and Desperado. Opposing the general, but not the coup, is a CIA guy played by Johnny Depp, who wants El Mariachi (Antonio Banderas) to kill the general before he can take power, but after the general has killed off the president of Mexico. Whether Depp's superiors in the CIA know or approve of this scheme is never mentioned, but as wacky a free lancer as Depp plays in this picture, it would be a surprise if he had official sanction to do anything.

The plot is more complicated than that, and really it's needless complication. We don't need double agents in the Mexican FBI, drug dealers undergoing reconstructive surgery to change their identity, revolution and riots in the streets, scheming presidential aides, foolish retired FBI agents, scheming drug dealer underlings, and on and on. That stuff could all work if the main story were more compelling, and we were rooting for anyone in the movie, but since it's all just a bunch of random characters doing random things, we never really care.

Looking at the other reviews online, I am surprised to see that the movie got 69% positive on Rotten Tomatoes, with 106/153 of the reviews positive. I think there are a lot of barely positive scores there, as evidenced by the 6.3/10 average review score. This is not a love it or hate it movie, this is a "do you like the good parts enough to outweigh the boring stuff" movie, and while I can imagine some critics thinking this one was a complete piece of shit, I have trouble imagining anyone giving it a rave review. I'm sure someone has (Metacritic points me to one, in the SF Gate, but it's pretty incoherent.) but they would have to be completely taken in by the stylish world Rodriguez creates, while not minding the long boring stretches or extraneous characters at all.

Since I'm not really making my point here, I'll briefly elaborate on my category scores.

Script/Story: 4
It's got a story, and there are some good lines in the script, but since I don't have a plot rating, this is where that attribute goes, and since the biggest problem with the film is the ping pong bouncing plot, it gets a 4.

Acting/Casting: 7
An 8 for Johnny Depp, and passable scores for everyone else.

Action: 6
Ehhh. There's a lot of action, but much of it is so nonsensical, and so much of it features apparently-invulnerable main characters that it's hard to know if we're to take the film literally, or as a sort of magical fairy tale, where the Mariachi simply can't be hit by bullets, no matter how many hundreds of them are whistling past him as he stands without cover and shoots at dozens of machine gunning bad guys.

Humor: 7
I laughed out loud at least a dozen times, but it was always a quick laugh, never a sustained one, and almost always due to a funny line by Johnny Depp's character. It's not a comedy, but it's much funnier than your average action film.

Eye Candy: 7
This score is almost entirely for Rodriguez's cinematography, which is bright, clear, and very vivid, even when the things on screen aren't especially pretty. The western look of the Mexican towns and countryside are gorgeous though, with the colors and lighting playing beautifully, even as it all looks poor, dirty, and dangerous.  Plus there's a bonus point for Salma Hayek's incomparable belly button, despite the fact that she's hardly in the movie at all. And no, she doesn't get her giant boobies out like she did in Desperado.

Fun Factor: 5
This score looks low, but it might actually be generous. After all, we were frequently bored and considered just stopping our viewing experience several times. I guess I'm glad we got through the whole thing, but it was more out of a sense of duty, and there was definite relief when the final action sequence finally wound down.

Replayability: 3
I can't imagine watching it again.

Overall: 6
Probably a generous score, but like the other critics on Rotten Tomatoes I found enough stuff to like that I can't really crap on the whole project. Desperado wasn't very good, and I gave it a 6.5, but it had twice the plot involvement that this one did, which means it should probably get more than .5 higher. Yet this movie wasn't so bad that I want to give it a 4 or 5 score. So I'm compromising on this one, while not being very happy about it.