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Like Leone’s Once upon a Time in the West (1968), Rodriguez plays out this film on a large canvas. El Mariachi’s quest for vengeance is only one of many plots, the locations are more expansive and the action set pieces more elaborate. Some viewers may be disappointed to discover that El Mariachi is not the focus of the story, as he was in the previous instalments. However, this also echoes Leone’s earlier film, where Charles Bronson was the mysterious gunslinger who starts the story off, but who also shared the screen with Jason Robards and Henry Fonda, whose characters acquired as much significance as Bronson’s as the story progressed. El Mariachi, like Bronson’s character, is an avenging angel who finds himself caught up in wider events around him. However, in addition to the action that we have come to expect from a Rodriguez film, there are also personal and heartfelt reasons behind the various characters' actions.
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Rodriguez
takes the archetypal characters and situations familiar from Leone’s films
and put a fresh spin on them. Almost everyone in the film’s large
cast gets a chance to shine, particularly Depp as the duplicitous Sands
(who gets a comeuppance of sorts, but who also, by the end of the film,
earns a degree of sympathy). Despite the various physical and emotional
ordeals that the characters go through, this is ultimately a terrific piece
of entertainment and Rodriguez is clearly enjoying himself. There
are sly nods to Leone’s films, along with scenes featuring Rodriguez’s
own macabre sense of humour. There’s also the director’s trademark
furiously edited action sequences, which include El Mariachi’s and Carolina’s
(Salma Hayek’s) hair-raising escape down the side of a building, and a
motorbike sequence that plays like a revved up chase from a western, with
bikes substituted for horses. Unlike the Spy Kids films, which
- understandably - dialled down the frenetic pace, gun-toting action and
slapstick violence that made Rodriguez’s other films so memorable, Once
upon a Time in Mexico brings back these qualities with a vengeance.