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The Mexico Trilogy Blu-ray/4K UHD Review

Writer's picture: Tyler FosterTyler Foster

Arrow Video

Blu-ray Release: August 27th, 2024

Video: El Mariachi - 1.85:1/1080p/Color; Desperado - 1.85:1/2160p/Color; Once Upon a Time in Mexico - 1.78:1/1080p/Color

Audio: El Mariachi - Spanish LPCM 2.0, English LPCM 2.0; Desperado and Once Upon a Time in Mexico - English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1, English LPCM 2.0

Subtitles: English (El Mariachi), English SDH

Run Time: El Mariachi - 92:49; Desperado - 92:49; Once Upon a Time in Mexico - 92:49

Director: Robert Rodriguez


In El Mariachi, a young mariachi player (Carlos Gallardo) looking for work drifts into town and finds himself in the middle of a mistaken identity crisis that could cost him his life, as he is mistaken for Azul (Reinol Martínez), a ruthless drug lord in the middle of a bloody battle with Moco (Peter Marquardt), a former ally turned rival. Also in the line of fire: Dominó (Consuelo Gómez), who runs one of Moco's bars while trying to resist his advances. The big-budget sequel, Desperado, finds the Mariachi (now played by Antonio Banderas) on the run from Moco's boss, Bucho (Joaquim de Almeida), who himself has his sights set on a local lady just trying to make good, Carolina (Salma Hayek). The trilogy concludes with Once Upon a Time in Mexico, in which the Mariachi is called upon by a CIA agent (Johnny Depp) to help stop a coup orchestrated by a drug lord (Willem Dafoe), a plan he will agree to not out of political righteousness but his own desire for revenge.



Of the various alumni of the '80s and '90s indie boom, there is a sense that Robert Rodriguez's work has fallen a bit by the wayside. There's no question he's less of a headliner than his best buddy Quentin Tarantino, and he's certainly putting out less work than Kevin Smith, Steven Soderbergh, or Joel and Ethan Coen. Even Sam Raimi, when he does make a project, tends to get more attention (even if that attention doesn't arrive on time, as with Raimi's Drag Me to Hell). No doubt that's in part because of his retreat into family filmmaking with the Spy Kids and Shark Boy and Lava Girl movies, but he was also never quite as skilled at blending his flashy pastiches with both style and substance like QT was.


Well, no matter -- it seems like some of Rodriguez's biggest hits are en route to new boutique releases, including The Faculty and From Dusk Till Dawn, and before those arrive we've also got the one that started it all for him: the Mexico Trilogy, El Mariachi, Desperado, and Once Upon a Time in Mexico. Amazing to think that it's been over 30 years since Rodriguez burst on the scene with the first chapter, which legendarily cost him only $7000, scraped together from participation in medicinal trial studies. Arrow's box set provides a great reason to give these '90s action sensations another look (as well as the more contentious 2003 concluding chapter).



What's sort of fascinating about El Mariachi now is that it's no longer immediately obvious why the film was a sensation back in 1992, other than the fact that it cost so little (tragically, today, I don't think this would be more than trivia to an industry that seems to have zero interest in being frugal beyond penny-pinching to exploit below-the-line crew). As far as scrappy debuts go, it's not the realm of The Evil Dead and Blood Simple, movies it seems openly inspired by, but it is a fun and well-made movie that makes admirable use of limited resources. Rodriguez's handheld cinematography is stylish and dynamic, recalling not just Raimi but also John Woo (something that would continue through Desperado), while also establishing its own vibe. In some ways, I'd be a little suspicious that the praise was a tad patronizing -- aw, such a low budget! -- but there is still a joy in revisiting the era when home video was still relatively new, and young filmmakers were feeding off of both their contemporaries and the genre classics they found in video stores.


If El Mariachi falters, it's when it comes to the story. The overall trappings are fresh, with the Hitchcockian "wrong man" plot threatening the mariachi's life, and the overall tone and the setting of the story give it a unique personality. However, the actual plot isn't that interesting, with the characters sketched a bit too thin to carry the viewer through even an economical 81-minute running time. It would probably help if Rodriguez had a more seasoned cast; while Gallardo, Gómez, and Marquardt are all serviceable, their performances are also fairly amateurish and can't elevate the material with great personality or pizzazz (Martínez, as the real bad guy, is the stand-out, an unconventional-looking hard-ass). Instead, the magic is in little details, like Rodriguez's comic use of a sleepy-looking pitbull, or surreal dream sequences that haunt the mariachi. The movie is entertaining, but it's probably more compelling as a curiosity than as an especially great low-budget action movie (even if it's a good curiosity, and not quite as trivial as some of Desperado's fans make it out to be).



While Rodriguez can't match Tarantino's skill as a writer of character and dialogue, one area where he does match his pal is the quantum leap forward in skill and execution between his debut and sophomore features. Desperado, like Evil Dead II, is a glorified remake of its predecessor, but it also never makes overtures about being anything else. Watching it for the first time in years, the movie is most potent as a neo-Western, borrowing again from John Woo and smashing it together with influences like Sergio Leone and the original Django to create a rollicking, crowd-pleasing hybrid full of squibs, slow-motion, guys literally flying across the screen as they get shot, like a comic book come to life. When the Mariachi (the role taken over by Antonio Banderas) and his new lover Carolina (Salma Hayek, in as instant a star-making role as one could imagine) walk away from a massive explosion, the flames forming a ground-to-sky backdrop behind them, there's a sincerity to the over-the-top absurdity of it that comes off as refreshingly old-school in 2024 -- they don't do this kind of thing anymore without winking.


Once again, the plot is basically an afterthought, and it is quite silly the way Rodriguez switches from Moco to Bucho (Joaquim de Almeida), who acts basically the same and dresses basically the same but is somehow supposed to be a new character. That said, Desperado has the last piece that El Mariachi lacked, which is a fantastic cast of stars and character actors that elevate their characters beyond what's on the page. Steve Buscemi, Cheech Marin, an incredibly young Danny Trejo, and Tarantino himself have a ton of fun popping into give the film some goofball personality, and in the leads, Banderas and Hayek are both excellent as well. Banderas brings bravado and badass attitude, but smartly undercuts it with just a hint of goofiness, a tone that ultimately feels like one of Rodriguez's signatures. Hayek is even better, imbuing Carolina with actual soul, the one note of Desperado that rises above silly B-movie...although, that could also just be what I assume is Hayek's own charisma showing through -- it's hard to imagine anyone watching the movie and not being charmed.



Alas, "charmed" is not a word that comes to mind when watching Rodriguez's trilogy capper, Once Upon a Time in Mexico. Energized by the digital footage George Lucas showed him from Episode II, Rodriguez wanted to shoot something on digital immediately, but only had a small window of time before he had to work on Spy Kids 2 (which was not a candidate for the new tech). He wrote a script in six days and shot the film over seven weeks. While this may feel like the setup for an obvious joke about the movie being slapdash, it actually doesn't feel that way: this is the first of the Mexico Trilogy to feel plot-heavy, spinning a convoluted story about a coup that has at least a couple of double-crosses that give way to triple-crosses, and so many characters that the Mariachi almost gets lost in the shuffle, not to mention his entanglement in another revenge plot that this time comes off as a downer. The towering ensemble cast includes Banderas, Hayek, Johnny Depp, Willem Dafoe (in unfortunate brownface), Mickey Rourke, Ruben Blades, Eva Mendes, Enrique Iglesias, Danny Trejo, Cheech Marin, and several other key supporting characters.


Historically, Rodriguez has been a pop filmmaker, so the revolutionary story at the heart of Mexico is sort of an odd duck. He stated in interviews he wanted to pay homage to Leone's The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, but Leone's movie deals with war in a fairly broad sense. Bringing the machinations of the US into assassinations and overthrowing governments is a more loaded concept, even if Rodriguez isn't making a movie set in America, and so the movie's toothless approach to those elements ends up undermining its simple message of liberation (especially depending on one's opinion of the Iraq war, although in fairness to Rodriguez, the film was written and shot by May 2001, months before the 9/11 attacks). On the plus side, Rodriguez was lucky to work with Depp right before he blew up with Pirates and became a much lazier actor (not to mention anything that went on in his personal life); this still feels like the young, fresh-faced Depp who was engaged and creative. Furthermore, even though the movie runs out of steam two-thirds of the way in, the digital look, for better or worse, feels like Rodriguez coming into his own. Even though he uses the same techniques from Desperado that were borrowed from Woo, the clean sheen (and a host of bold imagery, like Depp's blood teardrops emerging from under his sunglasses, and a Darkman-esque bandaged face) makes these flourishes feel digested into something uniquely his own.


Video

El Mariachi and Desperado were first issued by Sony on Blu-ray way back in 2011 as a double feature, with the third chapter being made available separately. Bizarrely, the next iteration offered even less: a Best Buy Pop Art Steelbook that only included Desperado. Finally, just a couple of years ago in 2021, Sony finally released a trilogy triple feature. There's rarely much transfer information on the average studio release, but I think it's safe to assume all of these older Sony releases featured the same presentations of the three movies. Arrow's website makes no mention of El Mariachi and Once Upon a Time in Mexico being remastered, my admittedly vague recollection of the old transfers is telling me that their new releases offer more nuanced color timing, with better skin tones and subtleties, but detail is basically the same, with little more to extract from El Mariachi's 16mm photography, and presumably nothing additional at all to extract from Mexico's once cutting-edge digital intermediate.


The real star of the set, then, is Arrow's exclusive 4K presentation of Desperado (which is once again available all by its lonesome, which makes more sense here than when Best Buy did it, for those who didn't feel the nominal upgrades to the first and last chapter were worth buying the trilogy). Unsurprisingly, this is another top-shelf effort that was completed by Sony themselves before being handed off to Arrow. Honestly, the opening scene, of Buscemi in the bar telling the story to Marin about the Mariachi, serves as a great demo sequence, showing off the depth, film grain, detail, and color the transfer has to offer, from watching the guys flying through the air as the Mariachi shoots them down, the red glow of the "Client is Always Wrong" neon sign and rich shadows at the bar in the story, the sweaty sun-baked yellow hue of Marin's bar, and the way those lights retract on the Mariachi's face during the story, it all looks fantastic. During the daytime, I especially like the clarity with which the transfer handles the warmth of the sun without tinting the bright blue skies, and the fiery richness of the famous explosion that served as the film's DVD cover for many years. Again, my memory of the old transfer isn't exactly razor-sharp, but there's no question that this is a reference-quality presentation of Desperado.



Audio

Although Arrow seems to make extra note of the fact that El Mariachi's original Latin-American Spanish audio has been given the uncompressed treatment here, the original language was also offered in HD on Sony's release, so I'm not sure what the big deal is. However, what were once DTS-HD 2.0 tracks have been replaced with LPCM. As with the transfers, from memory, I can't say I felt there was much of a difference between the two, with both iterations being limited by the lower-tech recording tools available to Rodriguez on the first time out. I also couldn't hear that much of a difference between the DTS-HD Master Audio mixes for the two sequels, which are significantly more impressive. English SDH subtitles are provided for all three, with an additional straight subtitle track for El Mariachi.


Extras

Arrow has produced some new interviews for this release of the trilogy, as well as including all of Sony's archival bonus content.


El Mariachi

  • Introduction by writer/director Robert Rodriguez (0:20) - Plays before the main menu.

  • "Big Vision, Low Budget" Interview with writer/director Robert Rodriguez (14:41) - Rodriguez talks about being inspired by John Carpenter's Escape From New York and the sense that Carpenter was a jack of all trades, the film's place in a series of collaborations with Gallardo, how the lack of crew helped a non-actor like Peter Marquardt give a better performance, working without sync sound, rearranging their schedule around the equipment, editing in-camera, keeping the journal that would turn into the book Rebel Without a Crew, unintentionally following the comic "rule of threes" just to make the movie long enough, editing the film twice on both tape and film, and a 1991 painting he made for a VHS cover (which is also included in the release copy of the set). For a guy whose films are energetic and over-the-top, Rodriguez's vibe is so relaxed and low-key, and this is a very fun interview about making the most of limited resources and working on your feet.

  • "The Original Mariachi" Interview with producer/actor Carlos Gallardo (15:21) - Gallardo briefly explains where he first met Rodriguez and some of the earlier films he worked on with and without Rodriguez before they embarked on El Mariachi. He goes into the development of the Mariachi character and the idea, begging for favors as a known person in town in his role as a producer, figuring out which people he knew would be good actors based on their existing public speaking efforts, leveraging Rodriguez being an American to get permission for the guns in the film as a bit of cultural unity, doing the stunts, finding the turtle, seeing himself on film for the first time, almost selling the movie to a distributor for $20,000 in order to buy a new stereo, handing the role over to Banderas, and working on the rest of the trilogy. Another very warm and low-key trip down memory lane.

  • "The Music of El Mariachi" featurette (12:41) - Musicians Alvaro Rodriguez, Chris Knudson, Eric Guthrie, and Marc Trujillo reminisce about the collaborative experience of working on the music for El Mariachi, which Rodriguez says he thought of less as a score and more as a series of small suites. All four discuss their history as musicians and how they became involved with the film, how their work was largely influenced and/or determined by the editing, and go into detail on how specific pieces from the film were created. As with many of the extras on Rodriguez's movies, this will probably be an invaluable piece for aspiring filmmakers who are working on the score for their own independent movies.

  • Archival extras - an audio commentary by director Robert Rodriguez (a track which celebrated its 30th birthday last year!), "Ten Minute Film School" (14:38), Rodriguez's "Bedhead" short film (9:09), a theatrical trailer, and a TV spot.



Desperado

  • Introduction by writer/director Robert Rodriguez (0:20) - Again, plays before the main menu. Note that this is also the exact same piece of footage as the one included on disc 1.

  • "Lean and Mean" Interview with writer/director Robert Rodriguez (17:19) - Rodriguez talks about the evolution of the original script from a remake of El Mariachi into a sequel to it; returning to the same place they shot El Mariachi; goes into depth about the casting of Banderas, Hayek, Trejo, and Marin; on-the-job training in terms of how to operate a Steadicam; working on the film's color palette and lighting design so that Rodriguez could shoot quickly; praise for his crew (both their work and their faces); being the first guy on the Sony lot editing electronically (including making fake trailers to help the actors know what they were doing); and turning in the movie before Sony needed it. Another great low-key interview. (I also have to say, even though it's obviously true watching the movie, that he validates the John Woo influence I mentioned in the review above.)

  • "Shoot Like Crazy" Interview with producer Bill Borden (11:21) - Borden discusses his history working on some of Taylor Hackford's movies, moving up the ranks at Columbia, seeing El Mariachi and meeting Rodriguez, shooting in Mexico, working Banderas and Hayek, doing stuntwork and effects (including a limousine that wouldn't flip), a great story about transporting guns for the film into Mexico, the title of the film, and lots and lots about Rodriguez's working style, work ethic, and creativity. A fun and lighthearted piece.

  • "Kill Count" Interview with stunt coordinator Steve Davison (8:10) - Davison talks about getting his start in the business, working out what Rodriguez wanted for the film, hiring both the main and secondary stunt people, working with the stars, and continuing collaborations with Rodriguez.

  • "Lock and Load" Interview with special effects coordinator Bob Shelley (8:50) - Shelley talks about his history with the military and how that led to working behind-the-scenes in Hollywood. Aside from the part in Rodriguez's El Mariachi interview where he shows off the painting, this is the first interview in the set that's a bit of a show-and-tell, with Shelley bringing the cameraman over to a table full of some of the rigs and apparatus he designed for the movie. He also speaks about Rodriguez showing him one of the effects after they filmed it, and how much respect Shelley had for seeing how Rodriguez could see how the effect was meant to work and shoot it correctly so that it looked great on film.

  • "Game Changer" appreciation by filmmaker Gareth Evans (6:42) - The least essential but probably the most joyous extra on the disc, this piece finds The Raid's Gareth Evans talking about seeing El Mariachi and Desperado for the first time, as well as the "Ten Minute Film School" and its follow-up on the DVDs, and how important those were to his own dreams of becoming a filmmaker.

  • Archival extras - another audio commentary by Rodriguez (this one only 28 years of age), "Ten More Minutes: Anatomy of a Shootout" (10:33), a textless opening (2:38), a teaser trailer, a theatrical trailer, and a TV spot.



Once Upon a Time in Mexico

  • Introduction by writer/director Robert Rodriguez (0:20) - Third verse, same as the first two.

  • "The Revolution Will Be Digitized" Interview with writer/director Robert Rodriguez (12:41) - This third and final interview with Rodriguez was the only one that kinda disappointed me, if only because I had hoped he would talk a little more about the script. Of course, I shouldn't be surprised, given the movie is a bit of a tech demo for Rodriguez that also happens to be a sequel to his famous trilogy. He also talks about encouragement from the studio, developing his own score, as well as developing some of the themes with the actors, how it turned out to be one of the only movies where the editing was a surreal experience for him, reframing the film in post (kind of bizarre that the disc doesn't use his preferred aspect ratio), and the importance to him of being able to share what he learned making the films with other people.

  • "Troublemaking" Interview with visual effects editor Ethan Maniquis (9:50) - Maniquis explains how he ended up seeing El Mariachi by chance after working on a Jeff Goldblum thriller, learning to edit on the lot through trial and error, the editing setup on Once Upon a Time in Mexico, working on visual effects, the advantages of shooting digitally, a crew of first-time filmmakers, and the impact of Once Upon a Time in Mexico.

  • Archival extras - A third and final audio commentary with Rodriguez (this one a mere 11 years old), eight deleted scenes (7:47) with optional commentary, "Ten Minute Flick School" (9:05), "Inside Troublemaker Studios" (11:24), "Ten Minute Cooking School" (5:50), "Film is Dead: An Evening With Robert Rodriguez" (13:20), "The Anti-Hero's Journey" (18:05), "The Good, The Bad, and The Bloody" (19:04), and the trailer in red and green-band versions.


As always, Genre Grinder only received check discs for the purposes of review. However, those who buy the set at retail will also be blessed with a hard outer slipbox featuring new artwork by Paul Shipper, as well as three individual cases and covers with additional Shipper art and the original posters on the flipside. They'll also get a collector's booklet with essays by Carlos Aguilar and Nicholas Clement, and not one, not two, not three, but four fold-out posters, with the same poster/Shipper art on the first three and one of Rodriguez's original El Mariachi poster concepts on the fourth. Last but not least, this is technically a rare combo release from Arrow, as it offers a Blu-ray disc of Desperado in addition to the UHD.


Conclusion

While Once Upon a Time in Mexico leaves something to be desired from a story standpoint, even that film captures the energetic, experimental, inventive spirit of Robert Rodriguez at his best. Taken together, the Mexico Trilogy also has the benefit of perfectly illustrating his arc from low-budget independent filmmaker working through favors and passion, going Hollywood with a larger budget, and then embracing the freedom of 21st century digital filmmaking. Each entry in the series is blessed with some entertaining new extras, as well as a hefty suite of classic extras that filmmakers like Gareth Evans have cited as an important resource in their own filmmaking journeys. Best of all, the peak entry, Desperado, is given a beautiful 4K UHD upgrade. Warts and all, this set is highly recommended.

Also, here are some bonus screencaps:


The images on this page are taken from the Blu-rays and sized for the page. Larger versions can be viewed by clicking the images.

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