Quartile rating: 6.5/10 · 1 rating
A corrupt CIA agent Sands hires hitman El Mariachi to assassinate a Mexican general hired by a drug kingpin attempting a coup d'état of the President of Mexico.
The third entry in Rodriguez's Mariachi trilogy suffers from an overly convoluted plot that juggles too many characters and subplots without coherent payoff. Depp's Sands is a charismatic highlight and earns the acting score a lift, but Banderas is underused in his own film. Visually it has Rodriguez's kinetic energy but lacks the raw inventiveness of Desperado. The climax is cluttered and unsatisfying, and the film feels like a bloated echo of what came before rather than a distinctive new entry.