A mediocre follow-up to a great independent film. It takes the original gritty format that El Mariachi used, and turns it into a bog-standard action film that feels more like a juiced up remake than a genuine sequel.
The story of the film is mostly identical to El Mariachi, but its status as a sequel raises questions that weren't there in the original. The Mariachi **(Antonio Banderas)** is supposed to be avenging his dead girlfriend, right? So why is he so comfortable sleeping up another woman in his quest for revenge? What about Navajas, the knife-wielding hitman **(Danny Trejo)**, and his overall unimportance to the plot? And for that matter, even the premise of the film is flawed! The Mariachi is after a guy named Brucho **(Joaquim de Almeida)**, but he's not even directly responsible for his girlfriend's death in the first place! The story is all over the place.
I also had problems with most of the performances in the film. Antonio Banderas is cool, sure, but his performance as the Mariachi was dull, and unsuiting for the everyman type persona that **Carlos Gallardo** carried with the same character in El Mariachi. **Salma Hayek** is very nice to look at in the film, but her character Carolina serves pretty much entirely as eye candy - [spoiler] especially during the gratuitous sex scene. [/spoiler] And as already mentioned, Danny Trejo's presence in the film was entirely pointless. The closest thing to an enjoyable performance in the film is **Quentin Tarantino's**, and to be fair to the guy, that joke about pissing everywhere was pretty damn funny. And **Steve Buscemi's** performance is so inconsequential to the film that it's almost worthless bringing him up (to be fair, he did alright).
Desperado isn't completely without hope. The style of the film is very slick and cool, almost like John Wick 20 years before John Wick did John Wick. The music is incredibly fitting and nice to listen to. The action is well choreographed and entertaining. And the film has a few moments that do stick out as being really well done. [spoiler] Hands down, the best sequence of the film is when the Mariachi is trying to load his gun to assassinate Brucho without making a sound. It's very tense, well shot, and well acted. [/spoiler] The film holds up on an entertainment level, that's for sure.
It's just a shame that nothing else in the film holds up well enough for me to really care.