Desperado (1995)

By 1995, Robert Rodriguez had already announced himself as a filmmaker with something genuinely different to offer. His debut feature, El Mariachi (1992), had become one of the most talked-about low-budget success stories in recent Hollywood memory, shot for a reported seven thousand dollars and picked up by Columbia Pictures after winning the Audience Award at Sundance. Desperado is the follow-up to that film, a bigger, louder, considerably better-funded revisiting of the same world, with Rodriguez returning to the sun-baked border towns and criminal underworlds that defined the original. Where El Mariachi was a scrappy, resourceful piece of filmmaking born of necessity, Desperado arrives with a proper studio budget behind it, Columbia Pictures bankrolling what is essentially Rodriguez's first mainstream Hollywood production. The result is polished but unremarkable in some respects, leaning hard into the kinetic, over-the-top action style that would become the director's calling card across films like From Dusk Till Dawn and, years later, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, which continued the El Mariachi story directly. The premise here is straightforward enough: a guitar-playing drifter with a violent past cuts a path through a Mexican border town in pursuit of a powerful drug lord named Bucho, leaving considerable carnage in his wake.

The film marks Antonio Banderas's first leading role in an English-language Hollywood production, a significant moment in what had been a career built largely in Spanish cinema, including work with Pedro Almodóvar (you can get a sense of that earlier career from our review of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown). Banderas brings a loose, charismatic physicality to El Mariachi, the kind of screen presence that makes even the most improbable action sequence feel watchable. Opposite him, Salma Hayek Pinault appears as Carolina, a bookshop owner who becomes entangled in the bloodshed, and the two have a genuine warmth on screen that gives the film a romantic dimension alongside all the gunfire. The supporting cast is an enjoyable collection of character actors and familiar faces: Joaquim de Almeida plays the villain Bucho with the appropriate level of menace, Steve Buscemi pops up in a nicely comic early scene, and Cheech Marin has a memorable turn as a barman whose opening monologue sets the whole thing in motion. Rodriguez also cast Danny Trejo, who would go on to collaborate with him again, and there is a small appearance from Quentin Tarantino, his contemporary and occasional collaborator. At 104 minutes, the film keeps a brisk pace, never lingering long enough to let the more threadbare elements of the script become a problem.

I based a DnD character on this It's brainless, but it's entertaining. Banderas is El Mariachi, a travelling guitarist with a guitar case full of guns. He must have the infinite ammo glitch. Like I said, it's whacky, it's unbelievable, it's poorly scripted and it's hammy af but for some reason you finish up saying "that was pretty fun" Tarantino, Cheech Marin, Salma Hayek and Danny Trejo round out the supporting cast in this decent Robert Rodriguez romance revenge adventure.

And honestly, that sums it up better than any lengthy dissection could. I did genuinely have a good time with this one, even when I could see the joins. There is something almost refreshing about a film that commits this completely to its own daft energy, and Rodriguez clearly knows exactly what kind of film he is making. If you enjoyed the frenetic, crowd-pleasing chaos of Planet Terror, you will recognise the same instincts at work here, just a decade earlier and with a guitar case instead of a machine-gun leg. Sometimes a film does not need to be more than it is. This one is a perfectly decent Friday night film, and I have seen far worse ways to spend 104 minutes.

Rating: ★★★  | Year: 1995  | Watched: 2025-05-13

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Trailer

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from Robert Rodriguez: Planet Terror (2007) · From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) · Machete (2010) · Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003)
More with Antonio Banderas: Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) · Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003) · Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022)
More from the 1990s: Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Shinjuku Boys (1995) · Blue (1993) · Cemetery Man (1994)
More thriller: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Angst (1983) · The Long Walk (2025) · Punishment Park (1971)
More action: A Better Tomorrow (1986) · The General (1926) · Hand of Death (1976) · Daredevil (2003)