It is one of the mysteries of cinema: the production can be slick as a hockey rink, the camera movements agile and athletic, the angles exalting, the action unrelenting, the overall direction giddy with the joy of creation, and still the movie can be stupefyingly dull. This second sequel to El Maricahi, colloquially billed as "A Robert Rodriguez Flick," as well as "Shot, Chopped, and Scored by Robert Rodriguez," in addition to simply "Written and Directed by Robert Rodriguez," serves to illustrate, if not illuminate, the mystery. No doubt the shooter, chopper, scorer, writer, and director has come a long way since the hand-crafted crudities of Mariachi, and yet the persistent dullness indicates that the mileage has been piled up in a tight spiral around a fixed point. No doubt, too, he has accomplished exactly what he set out to do in this self-consciously, tongue-in-cheekily mythologizing pageant. ("That," as a line in the script puts it, "is truly unbelievable.") No doubt he himself finds a Hong Kong action film by John Woo to be a completely satisfying aesthetic experience, and no doubt he would feel flattered to be included in the same sentence. One is tempted, then, to try to explain away the mystery by the absence of what once would have been called the human element: back before, that is, every fledgling filmmaker had to add Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces to his basic library, and mere heroes began to be crowded out by superheroes, one-man armies, instant legends, franchises. One needn't be a believer in Pure Cinema, though, to suspect there's more to it than just the total absence of humanity. Topmost among the director's glaring limitations is his propensity, like a muscle-bound headhunting prizefighter, to think in terms of one shot at a time: no combinations, no strategy, no pacing. The very definition, inside the ropes, of a palooka. Antonio Banderas, Johnny Depp, Willem Dafoe, Eva Mendes, Salma Hayek. (2003) — Duncan Shepherd