Word: desperado
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...away towards the Afghan border, the rest of us passengers stared numbly at the distant city of Quetta, under a haze of tear gas as black smoke poured from a few buildings. Later, I learned that the anti-American mob had torched several movie theaters, which have been showing "Desperado" and "Gladiator." They also burned down the U.N. offices because-well, who knows why. Maybe they didn't like the big blue lettering on the U.N. sign. Behind us, a few Pakistani MiG fighter jets were screaming back and forth across the sky, patrolling the Afghan border...
...away towards the Afghan border, the rest of us passengers stared numbly at the distant city of Quetta, under a haze of tear gas as black smoke poured from a few buildings. Later, I learned that the anti-American mob had torched several movie theaters, which have been showing "Desperado" and "Gladiator." They also burned down the U.N. offices because-well, who knows why. Maybe they didn't like the big blue lettering on the U.N. sign. Behind us, a few Pakistani MiG fighter jets were screaming back and forth across the sky, patrolling the Afghan border...
Quite the contrary. It stars Monty Python vet John Cleese as a Las Vegas casino titan who sends some hapless losers on a cross-country race, all for the amusement of a bunch of inveterate international gamblers wagering on which desperado will grab the prize: $2 million in a remote bus-station locker. Before the race is over, Whoopi Goldberg is stranded in the desert; Seth Green and Vince Vieluf, as two brothers whose greed is matched only by their stupidity, get trapped--in their Ford Bronco--atop an airport radar tower; a cow flies; Cuba Gooding Jr. hijacks...
...evil. In one respect, Spy Kids shares a clear kinship to Rodriguez's previous films though its breezy, comic-book inventiveness-the playful "kids-save-parents" concept is every bit as paper-thin as the simplistic "he-came-to-settle-the-score-with-someone-anyone-everyone" setup that drives Desperado. And Spy Kids is nothing if not a culmination of Rodriguez's starry-eyed fascination with slick, vivacious gadgetry, moving on from the guitar-case razzle-dazzle to electrically-charged bubble gum, satellite-dish wristwatches and, best of all, a plump, banana-yellow mini-submarine that becomes the center...
...with Rodriguez's inherent brand of filmmaking, which proves less suited to the constructs of the family feature. It's hardly a secret that his movies-especially the ones he writes himself-offer all the complexity of a dime-store novel. The fairly primitive characters in Desperado, after all, only really exist inasmuch is necessary to allow Rodriguez to string-together and stage his elaborate action set-pieces. It hardly matters one wink, however, because the whole movie is so intoxicated by its own style that its verve and kinetic energy become utterly infectious-each gunshot is like a jolt...