DESPERADO
A film review by Clark Goble
Copyright 1995 Clark Goble
Director: Robert Rodriguez Screenplay: Robert Rodriguez
Despite the hype that DESPERADO has received in the media and on the net I still went in with some trepidation. After all, the main people praising Rodriguez were fans of the Hong Kong school of directing: lots of bodies and guns that never run out of ammunition.
The movie actually surprised me. The first half was excellent. The best description I could give is to say it is Clint Eastwood's spaghetti westerns as done by Quentin Tarantino. The first half of the film is craftily put together with an excellent eye for both humor and suspense. The bar fight that opens the film is an excellent "dream like sequence" that sets the stage for what was to follow. The main bar room brawl in the first half of the film is one of the best done sequences of this sort since the original RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK.
Unfortunately, as good as the first half of the movie is, it does not begin to make up for the second half. Rodriguez seems to have run out of plot and by then all of the cameos are dead. What we are left with is a typical action movie without a plot. The twists in the movie end up being silly and the action sequences seem more like the A-Team trapped in a guitar factory. Only the A-Team gunfights seem a little more realistic. It is one thing to be over the top but quite an other to go completely overboard.
I really hope we get to see more of Rodriguez direction: he has great talent. Unfortunately, what we have as a first product is an other example of the paucity of good scripts in Hollywood.
Grade: B- (but only because the first half was so good)
D (the second half)
/// Clark Goble /// cgoble@fiber.net ///
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