Every day, Watch This offers staff recommendations inspired by a new movie coming out that week. This week: It’s Comics Week at The A.V. Club, and because we’ve already highlighted superhero movies and comic-book adaptations that aren’t about superheroes, we’re using the next five days to single out films whose imagery, storytelling, or themes are influenced by comics.
Once Upon A Time In Mexico (2003)
Like his good friend and collaborator Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez is known as a B-movie aficionado, stirring chunks of second-hand pulp into his own self-aware DIY myth-making. But his work also, consciously or not, incorporates elements of cartoons and comic books. This is visible not only in the actual comics adaptation Sin City (and, presumably, its forthcoming sequel) but also in the earlier Once Upon A Time In Mexico. Mexico concludes the trilogy that began with Rodriguez’s micro-budget debut El Mariachi and continued with Desperado. Antonio Banderas plays the Mariachi with no name for a second time, on a larger canvas and amidst an ensemble that includes Salma Hayek, Willem Dafoe, Mickey Rourke, Ruben Blades, Danny Trejo, Eva Mendes, and an invaluable Johnny Depp.
Like so many comics heroes, the Mariachi has a backstory that shifts while retaining certain iconic elements: his guitar case of weaponry, his musicianship, and tragedy that fuels some form of vengeance. Once Upon A Time In Mexico comments explicitly on the inconsistencies from its first sequence, in which Cheech Marin—possibly playing a bartender killed in Desperado—recounts a scene of the Mariachi shooting up a bar with some kind of gun-guitar hybrid. He then acknowledges that the tale may have “picked up some embellishments” over the years and revises the story to ground it, however slightly.