With Women Of Action,Caroline Siede digs into the history of women-driven action movies to explore what these stories say about gender and how depictions of female action heroes have evolved over time.
The unspoken rule of team-up action cinema is that men come in pairs and women come in trios. Hollywood loves the oil-and-water dynamic of Lethal Weapon, Men In Black, Shanghai Noon, Bad Boys, and Rush Hour, but prefers women to be a little more collaborative in the likes of Charlie’s Angels, The Powerpuff Girls, and The Marvels. Despite Cagney & Lacey‘s hit status in the 1980s, the groundbreaking, Emmy-winning two-hander didn’t lead to mimics on the big or small screen. International imports like Brigitte Bardot and Jeanne Moreau’s Viva Maria! and Michelle Yeoh and Cynthia Rothrock’s Yes, Madamare more the exception than the rule. Even the success of The Heat back in 2013 didn’t move the needle. Given all that, it’s kind of a miracle that 2006 served up the little-seen Penélope Cruz and Salma Hayekvehicle, Bandidas.
The comedy Western opened to mixed reviews and only made about half of its $35 million budget back at the box office, probably because it largely went straight to DVD in the U.S. By any objective measure, it’s not very good. Imagine if Wild Wild West and Thelma & Louise had an anti-imperialist baby with sexual exploitation undertones. And yet the sheer novelty of its existence swings it back around to being charming. At a time when women-led action movies were mostly characterized by garishly sleek, CGI-heavy vehicles like Æon Flux, Catwoman, and the Underworld and Resident Evilfranchises, Bandidas returned to old-school practical effects and a lighthearted action-adventure tone that’s rare enough for a movie that stars one woman, let alone two.
Set against the backdrop of 1880s Mexico, Bandidas is basically The Mask Of Zorro for a post-Coyote-Ugly world. María Álvarez (Cruz) is a poor farmer’s daughter with a quirky personality and a rebellious spirit. Sara Sandoval (Hayek) is the entitled, European-educated daughter of a wealthy Mexican banker. They couldn’t be more different, yet they’re soon united by a common enemy: American robber baron Tyler Jackson (Dwight Yoakam), who leaves both of their fathers for dead as part of his plan to strip the people of Mexico of their land. With nothing to their names, the two women meet while trying to rob the same bank—María to help the people of Mexico and Sara for personal revenge. Soon enough, they decide to team up to become Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid in push-up bras and hair extensions.
To get the bad out of the way first, there’s a dated, borderline offensive through-line of sexualization in Bandidas, which thinks the funniest thing in the world is to watch Cruz and Hayek fawn over Steve Zahn, who plays their crew’s nerdy forensic investigator. It’s not enough to have María and Sara wear bustiers while they rob banks, they’ve got to pose as burlesque dancers for a genuinely uncomfortable scene where they tie him to a bed and “comedically” practice kissing him. That’s on top of the fact that the movie was co-written and produced by Luc Besson, whose long history of compelling female action heroines is marred by the fact that he was accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women in 2018.
What almost saves Bandidas tonally is the fact that future Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales directors Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg turn it into the most lighthearted of romps. Pulling from the legacy of screwball comedy as much as action, Cruz and Hayek prove to be a genuinely hilarious double act, with Zahn as an equally great third wheel. Because the actors are so comedically in control of what they’re doing, even the offensive stuff barely stings, since it sits somewhere between a drawing room farce and a live-action Looney Tunes cartoon. More than anything, Bandidas evokes the spirit of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, where the lead performers are so in on the joke it always feels like we’re laughing with them.
The best sequence is a training montage where a grizzled bank robber played by Sam Shepard teaches the budding partners to trust one another—complete with an “I can’t swim” homage to Butch Cassidy. In between honing their skills with guns and knives, María radicalizes Sara’s pro-Mexico, pro-peasant politics, while Sara gets María to think in a bigger-picture way about how to help her cause. It’s not until you see their playful oil-and-water bickering in action that you realize how rare it is for female characters to have this kind of odd-couple dynamic, where they each bring different life experiences, skills, and moral codes to contribute to their team-up.
It helps that Cruz and Hayek’s real-life friendship translates into great onscreen chemistry. They both spent a lot of their early Hollywood careers playing the “hot girl” in more male-heavy casts—often competing for the same roles but never letting producers pit them against one another. In fact, despite their close personal connection, this remains the only movie they’ve ever made together. Hollywood doesn’t tend to cast multiple Hispanic female stars in the same project, which makes Bandidas feel fresh on multiple levels. Neither character has to represent the totality of 19th-century Mexican womanhood; the point is that there is no such singular archetype. María gets to be righteous but ditzy. Sara gets to be prissy but pragmatic. As Hayek put it, “We thought it would be very fun to do a Western where the women were not being rescued by a man, but we actually rescue a country.”
While it’s tempting to say Bandidas feels like the sort of adventure romp we’ve seen a million times before, it’s hard to think of another action movie that has one female lead playing tic-tac-toe with a horse as another robs a vault in ice skates—all while the overall message is that the United States is an evil, imperialist nation that deserves to be put in its place. Even if its style and tone are similar to what other buddy movies have done before, that’s kind of the point. Men get basic but fun team-up movies all the time. Women, not so much. Between its swashbuckling stunt work, screwball comedy banter, gorgeous location shooting, and hyper-stylized third-act shootout, the high points of Bandidas are almost enough to make you forget its catfighting-over-a-man lows. That may not make ita great movie, but it’s at least one that doesn’t deserve to be locked away in a vault.
Next time: The Geena Davis, Samuel L. Jackson thriller The Long Kiss Goodnight turns 30.
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