Premise: A young musician gets mistaken for an assassin.
I might as well see the movie that made Robert Rodriguez's career. Rodriguez really is a fascinating filmmaker. He's kind of become a prestige B-movie maker. His franchises are Spy Kids, Machete, Sin City, and the Mexico trilogy (El Mariachi is part one of that). He also has Alita: Battle Angel floating around. He's good at what he does though, which has led him to partner with guys like Quentin Tarantino and James Cameron. I basically associate him with being the guy you hire to do something fun and do something cheap.
El Mariachi is up there with Clerks as one of the best true indie movies that captures who the filmmaker is, only at a lower scale. Kevin Smith has made more ambitious movies than Clerks and films with better production value than Clerks. But all his films do feel like a scaled-up Clerks. I look at guys like Darren Aronofsky and Chris Nolan's first films. It's hard to watch Following and see the guy who made The Dark Knight or Interstellar though. Rodriguez, in a way, has been making El Mariachi his whole career. I mean, literally, his follow up was Desperado, a sequel to El Mariachi with a real budget and real actors. Sin City is El Mariachi after Rodriguez read a comic book. Machete is El Mariachi if he stopped caring about plot.
I won't go as far as calling El Mariachi great though. While informative of Rodriguez’s later career, it absolutely plays like a film made on a tiny budget with amateur actors. It holds the record for the cheapest movie to ever make $1 million at the box office, and it shows. This movie is clever and entertaining enough, but it definitely works best as a pitch for the filmmaker's next movie. Even though I know what Rodriguez has done with his career, I still spent most of my time watching this thinking "Just imagine what this guy could do with a real budget".
Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend
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