Desperado
Has anyone ever looked better shooting someone than Antonio Banderas does here?
Directed By: Robert Rodriguez
Other Notable Films From Rodriguez: El Mariachi, From Dusk till Dawn, The Faculty
Starring: Antonio Banderas, Salma Hayek, Steve Buscemi, Cheech Marin, Danny Trejo
Screenplay By: Robert Rodriguez
Movie Synopsis: A grieving musician avenges his lover’s death.
Signature Line: “Not yet.”
THE INTRODUCTION
An accounting of time, and people, and context
In 1993, Robert Rodriguez made El Mariachi, a Spanish-language action movie about a musician in Mexico who gets mistaken for a hitman and then pulled into a war between two drug lords.
The film was a top-to-bottom DIY effort from Rodriguez (he wrote it, directed it, produced it, edited it, and served as its cinematographer), which he somehow pulled off with a budget of just $7,000 (half of which he famously raised by volunteering himself for various clinical drug-testing trials). In various interviews after, Rodriguez said the movie was just something he did as a practice run for making proper feature films later (he was barely 23 at the time). But audiences responded with unexpected zeal.
El Mariachi won numerous awards (including an Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival and Best First Feature at the Independent Spirit Awards), drew effusive praise from the country’s most revered critics (Roger Ebert called it “enormously entertaining”; Gene Siskel described it as a “miracle of a movie”), and somehow earned more than 371 times its production budget during a theatrical run that Rodriguez had never even planned for (he’d intended for it to be a straight-to-video release in Mexico only).
And that’s how we got Desperado.
Columbia Pictures, the studio responsible for distributing El Mariachi to American theaters, gave Rodriguez a bigger budget ($7 million this time), access to proper movie stars (most notably, Antonio Banderas, Salma Hayek, Steve Buscemi, and Cheech Marin), and the promise of a much wider release for a sequel. And he delivered again.
Desperado maintained the same DIY feel of its predecessor (Rodriguez once again wrote, directed, and edited the movie himself) while also being bigger, slicker, sexier, more action-packed, and more stylistically inventive.
In the film’s opening scene, Steve Buscemi walks into a seedy bar and delivers a brilliant monologue about a mysterious stranger he had a chance encounter with. He builds the stranger up as an almost mythic figure, a man possessed of an inexplicable essence that makes him vital to the world.
More than 30 years later, and with over $1.5 billion in box office earnings now to his credit, that description feels like it applies to Rodriguez as well—even if he’s never been spotted traversing the desert with a guitar case full of a guns.
THE VIEWING
A timestamped rewatch of Desperado
1:02: Steve Buscemi is here. He plays Buscemi, El Mariachi’s main friend. His job in their partnership is to waltz into bars, talk very loudly about a guy with a guitar case full of guns wandering from town to town in pursuit of the man responsible for his lover’s death, and then report the general response back to El Mariachi. I’ve been extremely high on Buscemi for decades. His IMDb page is basically just a list of my favorite movies: Miller’s Crossing, Barton Fink, Reservoir Dogs, Airheads, Pulp Fiction, Billy Madison, Desperado, Fargo, Con Air, The Big Lebowski, The Wedding Singer, Armageddon, Big Daddy, Big Fish… The man has impeccable taste.
1:02: P.S. I’ve never tried to find photos of Steve Buscemi as a baby, but I’m certain Baby Steve Buscemi looked exactly like Adult Steve Buscemi. He was probably born with a full set of teeth and those same world-weary bags under his eyes. I love him so much.
2:13: Cheech Marin is here. He plays a bartender in a bar owned by Bucho, the man El Mariachi is hunting. I’m not sure what Cheech’s Q Score is outside of the Latino community, but for us he’s basically our version of… I don’t know… Richard Pryor seems like a good comp. He’s one of our towering figures, and I’m very happy that he had a stretch in the mid-90s where his level of fame was commensurate with his level of importance (from 1994 to 1996, he was in The Lion King, Desperado, From Dusk till Dawn, and Tin Cup).
2:36: Part of the reason so many people love Desperado is because the opening scene—where Buscemi tells a story about how he was in a different bar in a different city and watched a man walk in and kill everyone there, complete with very stylistic flashbacks to the mass slaying in question—is so fucking cool. The 12 best parts:
When Buscemi describes El Mariachi’s entrance into the bar by saying, “So, I’m sitting there, and in walks the BIGGEST Mexican I have ever seen.” (The Baby has described me this same way several times, but not in a flattering capacity.)
Buscemi talking about how even the light seemed to be afraid of El Mariachi, followed by the movie cutting away to show El Mariachi walking through the bar, with his face always 90 percent in the shadows no matter where he steps.
The part where one of the bartender’s buddies (played by the great Tito Larriva) responds to Buscemi’s claim about the light fearing El Mariachi by saying something in Spanish that makes everyone else in the bar laugh, but the movie never spells out what he said. (I’m a big, big fan of not having subtitles pop up in an English movie where several lines are spoken in Spanish. I think it always plays well.1)
The fact that El Mariachi orders a soda, not a beer. (This is the best representation the soda community has ever gotten in a movie.)
The part where Buscemi, really selling the story, unexpectedly jumps off his bar stool to start recreating El Mariachi’s attack on the men in the other bar. (Steve Buscemi is so fucking good for this whole stretch. He was the exact right person for this role.)
The way the shootings we see in the flashback are all ultra exaggerated. (Each guy El Mariachi shoots goes flying 15 feet through the air.) (A less patient man might say right here that Tarantino lifted his whole Stylized Violence thing from Robert Rodriguez.)
The way Buscemi describes the paralysis induced by the viciousness of El Mariachi’s assault, saying, “I was frozen stiff. All I could do was watch this… thing tear the place apart.” (I love that he describes El Mariachi as a “thing.”)
The way Buscemi tells the bartender that El Mariachi looked directly at him after he was done killing everyone, prompting the bartender to ask, “You saw his face?” Buscemi, dread in his voice, responds, “His face? No. His eyes.” And then we get this shot of El Mariachi:
🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
The sleight-of-hand El Mariachi does where he runs his fingers through his hair…
And then conjures a hand-held shotgun out of nothingness…
And then we go straight from the end of Buscemi’s story into the opening credits of the movie, which play out as a dream sequence where El Mariachi and two of his bandmates perform “Canción del Mariachi,” a fucking heater of a song…
God, I love this movie.
10:24: P.S. Desperado is the second movie in a trilogy all about El Mariachi’s adventures. Antonio Banderas took over the role here. Before him, it was played by a Mexican actor named Carlos Gallardo. That’s actually him to the right of Banderas in the screenshot above. I’m glad Rodriguez slid him in here.
10:25: P.P.S. During the performance, El Mariachi uses his guitar to knock out a man who’d taken a woman hostage at knife point, a thing that’s especially impressive because El Mariachi CONTINUES PLAYING HIS GUITAR while knocking the guy out. (My version of this is typing with only my right hand while holding a Baby Ruth in my right hand.)
10:26: P.P.P.S. Banderas is actually the one singing this song on the movie’s soundtrack. I love Gallardo a lot in El Mariachi, but he never had a chance at keeping that role once Banderas decided he wanted to do it. A 34-year-old Antonio Banderas deciding he wants your job is no different than a 34-year-old Antonio Banderas deciding he wants your wife: You’re coming out the loser, no matter what you do or say.
10:27: P.P.P.P.S. I just realized I’ve done all this talk about Antonio Banderas as El Mariachi before doing the proper GOOD MOVIE character introduction. That’s my fault. I’m just very excited about covering this movie this week. So:
11:54: Antonio Banderas is here. He plays El Mariachi, a vengeful musician haunted by the murder of his lover (a woman named Dominó). El Mariachi ends with the titular character killing the man responsible for Dominó’s death. In Desperado, he’s on the hunt for that man’s boss.
15:17: Everyone goes crazy for Ryan Gosling’s scorpion jacket in Drive, but I just wanna point out that Banderas did it first in Desperado.
15:18: P.S. If a movie has a scorpion in it, that movie is either extremely fucking cool (Desperado and Drive, obviously; but there’s also a scorpion scene in Predator, and a scorpion scene in Jarhead, and a whole Scorpion character in Mortal Kombat), or extremely fucking bad (The Scorpion King, Clash of the Titans, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation). There’s no in-between. It’s the most hit-or-miss arachnid of all.
