They hammered so relentlessly on the “mythic” elements of the movie they forgot to have a story and characters and indeed anything else worthwhile about the movie except that the cinematography was halfway decent in a few of the scenes, and Depp’s performance was OK. There were some fragmentary fun bits, typically lasting just a few seconds at a time, mixed in with the chaos that otherwise characterizes the movie.
There’s no point to nitpicking a deliberately plotless movie, but the action scenes are all so wild they make a HK wire-fu movie look perfectly plausible. The scriptwriters appear to have confused Mexico with Colombia or Peru as regards its politics. Depp did as good a job as one could hope for considering the scriptwriters couldn’t make up their minds about his character, since in the first half of the movie he is a wack-job villain, but then magically transforms into a sympathetic rogue. Without his performance, the movie would have been a total loss. But even so, in certain scenes Depp seemed disturbingly reminiscent of Michael Jackson…
I agree. While I liked it, a lot of the charm from the first two was gone and I think it had a lot to do with the Tom Clancy meets telemundo story driving the film.
I thought the movie got off to a pretty good start (“Are you a Mexi-CAN or a Mexi-CAN’T?”) but after a while it seemed to get a little pointless.
I don’t mind the fragmented plot (I really liked Charlie’s Angels 2). What I didn’t like was the way they just sort of glossed over the action sequences. The cuts were so fast that the film never took the time to savor anything, and you know they didn’t really work to make the scene. (I mean this in the sense of, consider a Kung Fu movie that uses lots of quick cuts from lots of angles, versus one with long sustained scenes. The first one probably means the guys didn’t know jack about fighting and just wanted to make something that looks like kung fu, whereas the second possesses a greater artistry, the people who made the movie are working for something higher).
The action sequences in Once Upon A Time seemed to be all about giving you the logical impression “they had this gunfight, he shot a bunch of guys” instead of actually being present in the moment of the action. If that makes any sense.
I would say Charlie’s Angles 2 had something of the same issue (lots of fast cuts, extremely fake action) but I felt that with CA, that was the point, so it just worked.
Other stuff about Once Upon A Time just got tedious. It seems like all of the bad guys have to show how much of a bad-ass they are, by randomly having people shot. That’s pretty stereotypical-1970s-supervillain already, even if you do it once, but they did it like 5 times. So the filmmakers set up this logic “bad guys will kill you just as soon as look at you”, but then they defy that logic in the end by only blinding Depp. Okay, I guess they did that so they could set up the scenes at the end, but it really shows as being “contrived event to make the plot go where they want it” as opposed to “event that happens in the natural flow of the world they’ve created”.
Once again Depp’s acting is great. The movie would have been significantly lesser without him. On the whole, I thought the movie was okay. I probably wouldn’t recommend it to anyone though.
