Depp is no mad Mex

Allegedly moved to complete his "trilogy" of El Mariachi movies by his friend, Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez has thrown everything into the cauldron for this overspiced finale. As well as looting his own earlier films, he plunders material from John Woo's seminal hitman movie, The Killer, Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch and more spaghetti westerns than you can grate Parmesan over. The result, not surprisingly, is a vivid, colourful and utterly senseless mess.

El Mariachi (Antonio Banderas), reduced to "El", is brought out of retirement by corrupt CIA agent Sands (Johnny Depp) in order to sabotage an assassination plot against the president of Mexico arranged by drug kingpin Barrillo (Willem Dafoe). El agrees, in order to avenge himself against Barrillo, who was responsible for the deaths of his wife (Selma Hayek) and their daughter. Caught up in the miscellany of twists, turns, betrayals and double-crosses are revolutionary agents, a former CIA officer (Ruben Blades) and hitpersons, including the pneumatic Ajedrez (Eva Mendes).

All of this is redundant, though, as the narrative is subjugated by a welter of slowmotion bullet ballets as El and his Mariachi buddies shoot their way through a series of encounters with bad guys, badder guys and really, really bad guys. The pleasures here lie in nuggets of dialogue ("Are you a Mexican or a Mexican't?"), the shoot-outs, car crashes and explosions, the presence of Mickey Rourke as Barrillo's chihuahua-toting sidekick, and Depp.

Johnny steals the movie in a performance that keeps faith with itself, while including a series of wicked impersonations of, among others, Marlon Brando and Chow Yun-Fat. He risks visual gags that only the most gifted silent comedians could have pulled off - especially in the latter stages when, blinded by the really bad guys, he stumbles like Oedipus through the carnage, bumping into window-ledges and shooting in all directions. He manages to keep the staggering violence at the level of justpalatable farce, especially when armed hilariously with an additional prosthetic limb.

Perhaps Rodriguez, as writer/ director/editor/composer, would have benefited from delegating some responsibility, particularly for the script. A succession of set pieces, however vivid and colourful - plus all the religious symbolism of the Catholic church and the Day of the Dead celebrations - will not alone make a coherent movie. And this is far from coherent. Colourful, but nuts.

Once Upon A Time In Mexico
Cert: cert15