The Brothers McMullen.

I told him not to do it (see, Commonweal, July 16, 1993). But he went right ahead and did it! Why don't movie directors listen to film critics? After all, we have only their best interests at heart.

In El Mariachi, the novice director Robert Rodriguez told a story fit for a comic book, and I don't mean one of those newfangled "graphic novels" but the old-fashioned, blotchy, low-down, subliterate kind. A naive young guitarist walks into a cutthroat town and is mistaken for a hired killer toting a gun inside his guitar case. Bad guys shoot at him, he ducks, finds a gun, shoots back, gets saved by a pretty girl, ducks more bullets. And that's it. Kiss kiss. Bang bang. But if the story was elementary, Rodriguez was a veritable rocket scientist when it came to low-budget filmmaking. (El Mariachi cost $7,000.) I observed in my review, "nobody in this film can so much as dive into a pool or flop down on a bed without Rodriguez showing the simplest action from a zillion different angles. The net result isn't arty, though, just jangling and kind of fun. Cubism for kids." But, knowing that Rodriguez had been offered a deal by Columbia to remake his movie with a bigger budget, I also feared he would "end up making something as well upholstered as Dave."

It would be a pleasure to eat my words, but alas, I am proved a prophet.

What we have in Desperado is just another slick, faultlessly crafted and totally uninteresting blood bath. With more bucks to spend, Rodriguez can now move his camera, pan and dolly and zoom, and achieve longer takes, and he doesn't have to resort to jigsaw-puzzle editing. But that jigsaw-puzzle editing was Rodriguez's only claim to style. Without it, he has none, only efficiency. (And sometimes not even that. In the last scene, a weapon case tossed away from a highway suddenly reappears a few shots later right back on the highway. Rodriguez didn't shoot enough footage, apparently. Old habits die hard.)

There is no suspense in Desperado, little wit, and none of the sanguinary lyricism Sam Peckinpah brought to The Wild Bunch or even the sheer hatred that infused Oliver Stone's disgusting Natural Born Killers. Desperado is too violent to be taken as a parody of the action movie genre, yet it's too facetious to be taken straight. It's a kung-fu flick with bullets instead of karate chops. And it's a high-tech bore.

But, let me hasten to add, it's not capitalism that has done in Rodriguez but a basic story-telling blunder. In El Mariachi, the exhilaration of the fighting sequences was in seeing how the lovably bumbling hero escaped, not in how many guys he killed. In Desperado, the revamped hero, now played by glamorous Antonio Banderas, knows how to handle a gun right from the start of the movie. Rather than rejoicing each time he escapes, we're supposed to be turned on by the sheer volume of slaughter. Jack the Giant Killer has turned into Giant the Giant Killer. That's not as much fun.

How many ways can bodies fall? How many shades of red does blood have? You can sense Rodriguez's desperation when he has his characters go in for corpse abuse, with Banderas slamming a dead man's head against a bar and shooting an already lifeless foe tumbling down some steps. What's next on the ultraviolent movie scene , I'm afraid to guess.

The only scene that entertains is the first one, in which the hero's nonviolent pal, played by Steve Buscemi, keeps a barful of toughs spellbound by a tall tale as he cadges beers from a grumpy bartender. So the only good thing in all this carnage is a funny monologue expertly delivered by an endearing actor. Naturally, peacemaker Buscemi has to be killed off a third of the way through so that Banderas must head on the vengeance trail. When a filmmaker has to kill off the best actor in sight in order to keep his movie commercially viable, he's in big trouble, no matter how much money Desperado makes.