Desperado (1995)

Desperado arrives from 1995 with a guitar case full of handguns and no agenda beyond the next shootout. Robert Rodriguez placed Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek at the head of a predominantly Latino ensemble, a configuration that Hollywood of that era regarded as a gamble, and the film wears it lightly. The Mexican border setting supplies the faces and the language, the soundtrack supplies Chicano rock from Los Lobos, and the whole arrangement reads as atmosphere, not argument. Nothing in the screenplay pauses to explain why these people are Mexican. They simply are, which is the least fashionable position available.

Hayek's Carolina runs a bookstore, which sounds promising until we notice what the part requires: she sutures the wounded gunman, conceals him from the drug lord who secretly financed her shop, and joins the final confrontation. She is competent and she is decorative, a love interest with a first-aid kit. The film holds no further ambitions on that front, and none on any other. There is no environmental sermon, no economic parable, no lesson about bodies or brains. Bucho is a criminal kingpin, not a metaphor. The violence is the point, and the ratings board demanded so many cuts that Rodriguez abandoned an entire finale rather than trim it further.

What remains is a sequel to El Mariachi, a machine for adrenaline that does not apologize for being one. Its legacy amounts to a Grammy-winning instrumental and a figure skater's costume, which tells us everything about the film's relationship to moral instruction. We went looking for a message and found a codpiece gun that was deleted from the picture. On the evidence, this is a film with nothing to teach and no interest in pretending otherwise.