It's impossible from one moment to the next to understand what's going on in Once Upon a Time in Mexico beyond a vague sense of Rodriguez's irritation with Dubya's dystopia and a feeling--sometimes operatic, sometimes not--of loss and the will to vengeance. Johnny Depp is Sands, a CIA agent who might be rogue but probably isn't, who likes slow-cooked pork and stealing the film from everyone else (see also: Pirates of the Caribbean). Sands is in Mexico to start a coup or thwart one, or allow one to happen and assassinate the perpetrator, and to do this thing or some combination of these things, he's hoping to enlist the services of legendary pistolero El Mariachi (Antonio Banderas), who, as the film begins, is sequestered away in a guitar-making village, mourning the murder of his wife (Salma Hayek) and young daughter. Willem Dafoe is a gangster or something made up to look like Charlton Heston from Touch of Evil, Mickey Rourke, carrying around a Chihuahua at all times, is Dafoe's number-one man, maybe, and then there's the president of Mexico (I think), who is about to be assassinated or something by someone or someones.

The Willem Dafoe character, Barillo, gets a gruesome face lift at one point and spends the rest of the picture swathed in bandages, leading me to wonder whether Dafoe was replaced a few days into filming--in high Ed Wood fashion--by an extra in gauze. Barillo also appears to have a daughter (Eva Mendes), a federal marshal or something who might be unfaithful or something. The fact that Rodriguez didn't have a completed script when he started shooting is not a surprise--the fact that there are claims that he had one by the time he finished, is. By the end, El Mariachi, rebel-without-a-crew Rodriguez's alter ego, walks off into the sunset draped in a Mexican flag, Rodriguez having ripped off the church shootout from The Killer, a chunk of the hospital and morgue intrigue from Hard-Boiled, the plastic surgery discomfort from Face/Off, and, switching directors briefly, the falling escape from Tsui Hark's Time and Tide, and the Odessa Steps sequence from Battleship Potemkin. Barillo, meanwhile, learns to play Carter Burwell's theme from Blood Simple.

Banderas is wonderful in the role of the heroic cipher, sadly set adrift in this mess with nothing to do but look good in black and spangle. Depp is fantastically weird and dangerous in a way that made the actor the perfect choice to play Hunter S. Thompson, while Hayek in a tiny role is back to look amazing. It's a great shame that with all of the ingredients for something fun, all Once Upon a Time in Mexico seems to be is a chance for Rodriguez to fart around with a state-of-the-art digital camera (it looks great); to push that exhausted envelope again in regards to violence and cruelty; to push a lack of respect for audience in his astonishing disregard for preparation; and to pretend that all those images and showdowns weren't already done and with more clarity, justification, and invention. (And by men that Rodriguez probably meant to compliment, besides.) Hyperactive and unmoored from anything like context, either externally or internally, the picture is a bombastic vacuum; only a vision of Depp, cheeks streaked with blood like a perverse harlequin, transcends the fast fashion of the whole exercise, providing an enduring image for the piece along with a pithy comment on an onanistic experiment that is, ultimately, unwatchable. There's energy in the thing, no question, even if it's stolen, a few scenes and shots breathlessly romantic and breathtakingly kinetic, but Once Upon a Time in Mexico is a picture mostly in love with the grotesque and itself--a work of immense hubris, and a series of barely related vignettes with loosely continuous characters.

On the other side of the pond, Shane Meadows' Once Upon a Time in the Midlands is also about a guitarist treated unkindly, a mysterious stranger with a fearsome reputation, an idyllic relationship disrupted by tragedy, a self-described "mysterious Zorro figure," and another take on the western genre complete with an ambling Southwestern-flavoured score. Played for romantic comedy yuks rather than gravid melo-operatic contortions (and distinguishing itself from other products of the UK comedy mill by not featuring any old men and women or young boys naked), the picture follows the plight of shiftless loser, small-time criminal Jimmy (Robert Carlyle) as he steals a lot of money from three circus clowns and returns to his small Scottish burg to reclaim his lost love Shirley (the insufferable, simpering Shirley Henderson) and their daughter Marlene (Finn Atkins) from the clutches of mild-mannered simp Dek (Rhys Ifans). The first tense moment involves Dek being humiliated while proposing to Shirley on a Jenny Jones-like television show, the second involves Jimmy being hunted down by his partners in crime, and the third involves me deciding whether or not to take the constant watch-checking as a clue that my time would be better spent walking around, staring directly into the sun.

Once Upon a Time in the Midlands features a load of low-angle, monumental compositions that make light sport of the fact that Meadows is terribly clever for substituting a cordless drill for a colt revolver. A mournful penny-whistle now and again apes Ennio Morricone's scores for Leone, calling attention to the fact that the picture is unsuccessful as a tribute, a comedy, a crime thriller, heartfelt pap, and a romance. It's convenient, slapstick, and unimaginatively scripted and directed, overlooking the most basic of plot points (like why doesn't Shirley ever warn Jimmy about the trio of goons coming after him--and what happens to the goons for the final third of the film, anyhow?) while fixating on minutia bizarre (like how Dek appears to be named after his non-vanity license plate) and unfruitful (like Jimmy's uncle dubbing himself "Charlie Nashville" and composing bad music while on the toilet). Once Upon a Time in the Midlands is as stupid as Once Upon a Time in Mexico, in other words, and very nearly as arbitrary. But for as empty as it ultimately turns out to be, at least the latter boasts of some agreeably manic eye candy from Rodriguez. He's less filmmaker now than freakshow, but at least it can be said that freakshows aren't boring.-Walter Chaw