‘Desperado’ At 30: This Hybrid Of Western Tropes And Hong Kong Action Sensibilities Is Surprisingly Timeless

Funny, in a way, that Desperado isn’t much talked about as a contemporary Western. Maybe it was by default when it first came out, and maybe 30 years is too long for the word “contemporary” to still apply. But this Robert Rodriguez movie, released at the tail end of summer 1995, isn’t set in the Old West, and features a much heavier artillery than most movies that are. The Western’s greatest post-Eastwood flagbearer, Kevin Costner, hasn’t quite figured out to jump into the present day. (When he wants to go contemporary, he moves over to sports.)

Maybe Desperado doesn’t have a reputation as a classic Western because the genre had been largely ceded to the Eastwood/Costner axis in the mid-’90s – they helmed both of the decade’s Best Picture/Director Oscar wins in the genre, after all – and Desperado was unmistakably a young person’s movie. Rodriguez made it at 27 as a sort of half-remake, half-sequel accompanying his self-funded action/Western El Mariachi. This makes it the Evil Dead 2 of Westerns – fitting, given that Sam Raimi also had a violent shoot-em-up Western out in 1995, albeit set in a more traditional time period. It’s also fitting, in that Rodriguez takes a Raimi-like pleasure in the mere act of staging genre-movie standbys, in this case various shoot-outs and showdowns.

Rodriguez’s predilection for gunplay also recalls the Hong Kong action pictures that were making their way to American shores in the 1990s, with an endearing brattiness compatible with his pal Quentin Tarantino, who has a smallish supporting role here, as was the style at the time. (Tarantino gets a lot of crap for his onscreen presence or lack thereof, but give the man some credit: More often than not, his movies for himself or Rodriguez cast him as a creep, a loser, and/or bullet fodder. Guess which one(s) apply here.) Those movies have a Western lineage too, of course, so it’s all a rich tapestry. But years later, despite precisely the kind of fashionable action that should quickly date it, Desperado’s remixed style has a surprisingly timelessness.

That could be due to the appealing simplicity of the premise, encapsulated in the movie’s dynamite opening sequence. A man with no name walks into a dive-y bar – only it’s not the Mariachi (Antonio Banderas), not yet. Instead, his weaselly little sidekick (Steve Buscemi) shows up to tell the tale of, yes, a stranger rolling into another dive-y bar and shooting up the place with mythical, near-magical precision. Rodriguez actually takes his time before his lead draws his gun outside the realm of shadowy, ultra-stylized retelling; there’s Buscemi’s story, a musical credits sequence where Banderas is first scene singing and strumming a guitar; and that leads into a brief flashback to the events of El Mariachi (which did not star Banderas), where his lover was shot by a lieutenant of the drug lord Bucho (Joaquim de Almeida).

After some more scene-setting, plot details, and character stuff, it’s a full half-hour before the Mariachi actually walks into the bar from the opening to follow up on Buscemi’s insouciant prophecy. The seven-minute shoot-out that follows is admittedly more John Woo than Sergio Leone, capped with the solid gag of Banderas and his last remaining opponent frantically scrounging around among the dead bodies for a single loaded weapon. In this scene and throughout Desperado, Banderas moves with a dancer’s elegance; it’s a cliché to call these kinds of action sequences “balletic,” and Rodriguez is generally a little more brute-force with his choreography. But Banderas does little spins, flourishes, and glowers that are as integral to the movie’s style as the slow-mo and the copious squibs.

He’s also just a beautiful man, matched in that area by Salma Hayek as bookstore owner Carolina, who helps the Mariachia work his way up Bucho. The requisite guns-Blazing showdowns (and yes, one terrifically overheated, rolling-spurs sex scene wit enough positions for three) follow. What makes the story feel more like a Western, despite classic Westerns’ lack of scenes where the mysterious stranger jumps backwards off a rooftop whilst firing two guns at once, is Rodriguez’s delight in myths and legends, further developed in the final movie of his Mariachi trilogy, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, where the Mariachi story is both retold and continued, further blurring the “actual” events of these characters’ lives. There’s an Old West tall-tale sensibility overlaid onto all the New West automatic gunfire and bloodshed.

In retrospect, the mid-’90s was a perfect time to tell this story with its intentionally loose continuity and relative lack of modern tech (besides, of course, the amped-up artillery, including, in one sequence, a guitar-case rocket launcher of questionable practicality). Some probably considered Rodriguez opportunistic for immediately upgrading his scrappy indie into a Hollywood-funded shoot-em-up, and then continuing to shoot ’em up (in spirit even if not always in practice) for many years thereafter. Beyond that aforementioned interest in self-referential stories within stories, Rodriguez never really appeared to develop a full worldview or sensibility that would elevate his work beyond B-movie fun. But that, too, makes him a solid Western director – not because Westerns lack rich subtext, but because at their peak there were plenty of churned-out programmers with whatever style their directors could fit into a busy schedule. That’s the spirit Desperado still taps into all these years later.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.