Bandidas (2006)

Bandidas arrives from 2006, a moment when a European-financed Western comedy could put Penélope Cruz and Salma Hayek in the same frame and call that a premise. The film casts two Latina leads as a peasant and an heiress in 1880s Mexico, which is representation of a sort, though the roles are baked into the setting and the era. Their characters exist because the story is Mexican, not because a studio spreadsheet demanded them. The distinction matters to the classification.

The picture's politics are Robin Hood economics, plainly stated. A robber baron named Tyler Jackson seizes land and gold from Mexican towns, and the heroines rob banks to hand the money back to the dispossessed. That is a class grievance with a light anti-imperial tint, and it is delivered through heists, train chases, and knife-throwing instead of speeches. Commendable restraint. Where the film stumbles is in its handling of its own heroines. They take up arms and outwit every man in authority, then spend the middle act squabbling over a captured investigator like two cats on a windowsill. The solidarity is real but contingent, and it arrives only after a river rescue.

What remains is a curio. The film is not preachy, not environmentally minded, not interested in bodies, brains, or the historical record beyond the costuming. It wants to be a Western with two women in the saddle, and it mostly is one. There is something almost admirable in a movie this indifferent to the cultural conversation of its own moment and of ours. It has no sermon to deliver. It has a train full of gold, a villain in a fine hat, and two stars who deserved a better script. The mixed reviews were, in the end, generous.