Desperado (Film Review)

1995 Sony Picture
Written and Directed by: Robert Rodriguez
Starring: Antonio Banderas, Joaquim de Almeida, Salma Hayek, Steve Buscemi, Cheech Marin, and Quentin Tarantino
MPAA Rating: R; Running Time: 105 Minutes
The Nicsperiment Score: 5/10

El Mariachi's love has been murdered and now he wants revenge. Well, I guess in the last movie he already got revenge for murdering the guy who murdered his love, but now he needs to murder the boss of the guy who murdered his love for some reason. Along the way, he'll murder a million other men and meet another love, while playing a song every now and then because he is, after all, El Mariachi.
1995's Desperado contains several cool elements, not least of which is the protagonist's guitar case full of guns, or a late scene where two of his compadres have guitar cases with even better weapons inside. Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek are fetching human beings and the dusty streets of Mexico as presented by this film are equally inviting. 

However, Desperado doesn't make any damn sense. The plot is somehow both barely existent and nonsensical. The action is cool in doses, but often so over-the-top, it becomes boring, as there is not even the slightest attempt toward realism, or even internal logic. Likewise, human life, outside of Banderas and Hayek's characters, is valued even less than bullets spent, and even major characters' deaths fail to register on any emotional level.
With all that against it, Desperado, which is writer and director Robert Rodriguez' second cinematic effort, and the second film in his Mexico Trilogy, has to get by on nothing but mood and the sheer charisma of its two leads. Those things combined aren't enough to make a good movie, but are at least enough to make Desperado watchable.