WORLD TOUR Day 60 - Mexico
BEFORE: I taped this one off of cable solely for the Mexican setting, without realizing I set myself up to watch the third film in a trilogy, without having seen the first two films. I take full responsibility for the consequences. I hope the plot of this one doesn't rely on what has taken place before. Linking from "Under Fire", Gene Hackman was also in "Mississippi Burning" with Willem Dafoe (last seen in "Speed 2: Cruise Control")
THE PLOT: Hitman "El Mariachi" becomes involved in international espionage involving a psychotic CIA agent and a corrupt Mexican general.
AFTER: This isn't really my scene, because the action and violence are so over-the-top that it's almost like a live-action cartoon. I get hung up on things like the physics of stunts gunshots, and this has enough impossible and implausible occurences to keep the Mythbusters busy for a whole season.
(Come to think of it, get the Mythbusters guys on the phone - can you make a guitar function like a gun, or a flamethrower for that matter, and still be playable as a guitar? I'm guessing the answer is no, but I'd like to know for sure.)
Once again there's a military coup in a Latin American nation - that's the third one this week, but who's counting? - and once again the CIA is involved. But so is a (retired) FBI agent, a current AFN agent (sort of a Mexican ATF?), a druglord, a general...you get the idea. To say that it's hard to keep track of all the players here is an understatement, plus all the loyalties keep shifting, pitting characters who were once allies up against each other.
The famed "Mexican standoff" so common in Tarantino films is well represented here, but so are magic bullets that always seem to find their targets - when fired by the heroes, of course. The villains can shoot hundreds of bullets and miss every time. But this is all in the name of storytelling, of course, and I do make allowances for that. But hero bullets here also have the power to propel bodies across the room, and that's just not how ballistics work.
My DVD was a little glitchy, or maybe my brain missed something, but I never saw the scene in which a major character got blinded. I rewound and looked for it, still couldn't find it. So this plot twist seemed to come out of nowhere for me. It's interesting, sure, but I was left wondering who blinded him and why. Another odd choice was to have a character spend the whole last act with his face in bandages. I understand why he wanted facial surgery, but it's still an odd choice - unless the actor himself wasn't available for the whole shoot, and a stand-in was used.
Also starring Antonio Banderas (last seen in "The Mask of Zorro"), Johnny Depp (last seen in "Alice in Wonderland"), Salma Hayek (last heard in "Puss in Boots"), Mickey Rourke (last seen in "Man on Fire"), Eva Mendes (last seen in "The Other Guys"), Ruben Blades (last seen in "Disorganized Crime"), Danny Trejo (last seen in "Predators"), Enrique Iglesias, Cheech Marin (last heard in "Cars 2").
DISTANCE TRAVELED TODAY: 991 miles / 1,595 km (Managua, Nicaragua to Mexico City, Mexico)
DISTANCE TRAVELED SO FAR: 45,465 miles / 73,169 km (kms again adjusted for rounding errors)
RATING: 4 out of 10 packs of gum
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