Triple Threat: The Mexico Trilogy
With his Mexico Trilogy, Robert Rodriguez brought bullet opera down South.
A story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Maybe that’s why the trilogy is such a satisfying structure for so many epic series or curious corners of cinema history. This year in Triple Threat, Ken Lowe revisits another of cinema’s best trilogies each month, including some unofficial trilogies that have come to define a director, actor, or time in film history. You can follow the series here.
There’s an old form of novel from Spain called the picaresque (picaresca), and the setup is always around a rogue at the margins of society, the sort of gentleman criminal who only rips off those who deserve it and wanders from misadventure to misadventure, always getting out of trouble by the skin of his teeth. Like Don Quixote, the picaro at the heart of the tale may be oblivious to what he’s doing. We root for him because we want to root for the outsiders, the people who won’t trade freedom for comfort, or who simply won’t just sit there and take it when a wicked man steps on them.
Robert Rodriguez’s eclectic filmography has shark girls and lava boys, kids who are also spies, and films that have sought to capture the grindhouse aesthetic in modern times, or bring a noir comic book to life in all its cartoonish grandiosity. And then, he’s got something completely unlike any of the rest of them, his picaresca: A trilogy of bullet opera films about a man with a guitar and a price on his head, the last one of which dropped as pure action movies began quietly losing space in the cineplex next to the superhero blockbusters that have dominated for the last two decades.
El Mariachi, Desperado and Once Upon a Time in Mexico are best watched as a single meandering tale, even as each one becomes more expensive and grandiose with each entry. The only constant is Rodriguez’s keen instinct for action behind the lens. Is he self-indulgent? Reader, he is a director known for buddying up with Quentin Tarantino and producing movies based on ideas from his own kids. But it’s way more fun to watch Rodriguez self-indulgently blow shit the hell up than it is to watch any of Tarantino’s characters monologue. Search your heart, and tell me I’m wrong.
The Movies
Purportedly made for just $7,000 and hyped as the next gritty indie find by Columbia Pictures, El Mariachi starts with a failed assassination attempt against a cartel heavy who is sitting in prison. Azul (Reinol Martínez) sees his assassins coming and just so happens to have armed everyone in the prison for just such a contingency. The cartel boss who tried to have Azul killed, Moco (Peter Marquardt), puts a hit out on Azul. The trouble is that the only description his triggermen have of Azul is that he carries a guitar case.
At the same time, a nameless young man (Carlos Gallardo, who co-produced) drifts into town, looking to make his way as mariachi like his father and grandfather before him. All he’s got is his somber narration, a fistful of pesos, and a guitar case. El mariachi tries to find some work, but discovers the cheapskate barkeeps are content to underpay one guy on a Yamaha. The situation is bad enough without him being mistaken for Azul and suddenly pursued by every pistolero in town.
Absurdly, el mariachi totally smokes them all, even though he’s clearly in over his head. He falls in with the maven of another bar in town, Dominó (Consuelo Gómez), who hides him even as she also hides that she was given her business as a romantic gesture from Moco himself.
El Mariachi, like every entry in the Mexico trilogy, moves quickly and doesn’t waste a lot of time, escalating toward the catastrophe we know must be coming. El mariachi has no luck in work, no luck in love, and no hope to achieve the only dream he ever dreamed. The only thing is to bind his wound and roll on over the dusty highway.
Rodriguez added his name to those Gen X directors that were surging to prominence in the 1990s in the arthouse scene, and he’s never really lost that outsider mystique, even as his works have topped the marquee and the box office.
What Rodriguez gained, however, was Hollywood money. And so, just two years after El Mariachi, Desperado hit theaters, recasting El Mariachi as Antonio Banderas. (Gallardo appears in the same film as one of El Mariachi’s two “bandmates,” though, and has popped up many other times in some of Rodriguez’s other works. In both the sequels, El Mariachi has befriended guys with guitar cases filled with machine guns and explosives. This is not explained, and it is glorious that it is not.)
In the sequel, El Mariachi continues on the path of vengeance, blowing away cartel members in a quest to rid the world of everyone in the organization that killed his lover in the first film. Far from a timid guitarrista, Banderas portrays his El Mariachi as a nigh-unstoppable action hero, filling both hands with whatever guns are within reach and spraying lead in every direction until he’s the last man standing. Like El Mariachi, there’s not much to the plot: Banderas rolls into town to dispense comeuppance and becomes embroiled in the life of Carolina (Salma Hayek), a bookstore owner who, like everyone else in town, tacitly profits off cartel leader El Bucho (Joaquim de Almeida). Aided by sleazy informant Steve Buscemi, El Mariachi does battle with Bucho’s men, always seeming as if he’s surviving partly by grit and luck, even if Banderas is way better at shooting than Gallardo was in the first movie. When faced with a knife-throwing Danny Trejo, he barely escapes alive.
It ends in a melodramatic confrontation and a hail of bullets, all of it worthy of a telenovela my Cuban abuelita would’ve devoured.
It would be eight years before Rodriguez returned to the character in the brash, over-the-top, over-complicated Once Upon a Time in America, an even more star-studded outing that despite all of that somehow manages to still clock in at comfortably below two hours. The plot sounds more complicated than it really is, and there are somehow more characters than there need to be, and one of those characters is a deeply unpleasant Johnny Depp.
Depp plays Sands, a cocksure and arrogant CIA agent who seems to represent every imperialist attitude the United States holds toward Mexico, right down to being such a snob about the local cuisine that he is willing to randomly murder a cook for overachieving. Sands enlists the aid of a retired El Mariachi, who we learn through a series of flashbacks lost Carolina to a jealous lover who happens to also be a Mexican general. This doesn’t make too much sense: She was a cartel boss’ ex-lover in the last movie. But, like El Mariachi’s wounded hand (blasted straight through in the first film, seemingly whole but suitable only for shooting in the second movie, now rehabilitated enough by a brace that Banderas can do finger work again) it’s best to just let the ret-cons roll over you and enjoy the ride.
Sands wants to stop a coup orchestrated by the cartel leader Barillo (Willem Dafoe) using the military muscle of the same general that killed El Mariachi’s gal (Gerardo Vigil). For that reason, he’s also put a Mexican deep cover FBI agent (Rubén Blades) on Barillo’s trail, and that of Barillo’s lieutenant, an American named Billy (Mickey Rourke, who between this and Man on Fire, was getting killed in Mexico a lot during the post-9/11 years). But ridiculously, Sands also wants the sitting president (Pedro Armendáriz Jr.) to die in the attempt. So he’s working with inside woman Ajedrez (Eva Mendes) to make sure el presidente goes down.
Rodriguez brought everybody along for the ride, including returning roles for both Cheech Marin and Danny Trejo, who don’t play the same dead guys they were playing in the last movie. Enrique Iglesias plays one of El Mariachi’s two machine gun guitar partners in this—they are different machine gun guitar partners than in the last movie, since those two guys both got killed.
It’s a reference-heavy mashup that goes wild places. It is still fun to watch because Rodriguez keeps topping himself with every action setpiece, stunt and Latin-flavored gunfight. Johnny Depp gets both his eyes surgically extracted and wanders around the city navigating by hearing and the innocent aid of a little kid who sold him chicle—as if he’s wearing the stigmata Rodriguez wishes he could inflict on the whole alphabet soup of agencies whose primary job seems to be to destabilize Central America. The bad guys all end up extremely dead at the hands of men wielding machine gun guitar cases and an entire crowd of patriotic mexicanos dressed in Dia de los Muertos finery. An old lady, bandoliers on each shoulder and a sawed-off shotgun in each hand, screams battle cries while she guns down insurgents in the street, and the last image before the cut to credits is Banderas ambling down the road draped in the red, white and green.
It is so stupid. It is so beautiful.
Once Upon a Time in Mexico, along with Kill Bill, Man on Fire and The Punisher the next year, were part of a kind of last gasp of pure action flicks in the early ‘00s—you’ll notice even in that lineup, a comic book movie slipped in.
Best Entry
It’s hard to give El Mariachi a fair shake in the Mexico trilogy, since it is resolutely a different genre than the others—more a cartel melodrama than a bullet ballad. With the caveat that you should go into that expecting something much different than in the latter two films, I’m awarding this one to the middle entry, Desperado, which features both some inspired gunplay and Banderas and Hayek having So Much Sex. It’s particularly fun to see Gallardo return in a supporting role in which he gets to mow down mooks with a tailored traje charro on his back and a smile on his face. Never let it be said that Rodriguez does not remember his own.
Ranking Among Other “Once Upon a Time in” Movies
1. Once Upon a Time in the West
2. Once Upon a Time in America
3. Once Upon a Time in China
4. Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood!
5. Once Upon a Time in Mexico
I’m sorry, but it’s true.
Marathon Potential
Very good, for the simple reason that all three of these clock in at under two hours, so they make for a comparatively fleet evening. The best way to enjoy them is in release order, so that any tequila is only really kicking in after El Mariachi is through, and you won’t be missing any particularly important plot points or dialogue amid the flashy fights and smoldering looks.
Join us next month when Triple Threat revisits the last superhero trilogy before the Marvel dominion, Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy!
Kenneth Lowe is the best puerco pibil you have ever eaten. You can follow him on Twitter @IllusiveKen until it collapses, on Bluesky @illusiveken.bsky.social, and read more at his blog.