In Bandidas (2006), a just-fun-enough Western comedy set in 1880s Mexico, Salma Hayek plays Sara, a woman of wealth back in town after getting a cosmopolitan education abroad, and Penélope Cruz plays María, a woman with nothing to her name besides common sense and other things you pick up growing up on a farm, like shooting a pistol. The women start the film natural enemies — Sara’s father owns the bank responsible for forcing María’s dad off his land at the start of the movie — then are brought together when a wicked and weasley American land baron (Dwight Yoakam) shows up and shoots both their fathers, hoping to seize control of the banks and continue the trend of expelling locals off their properties to strengthen his power and domain.
Sara’s dad dies; María’s father barely makes it. Their fresh grief leads them to the same idea: to rob the local bank, where they serendipitously show up at the same time with guns cocked and bandanas haphazardly veiling their faces. Sara’s here to get revenge on the baron. María wants the funds necessary to return stolen land to the rightful owners. The pair plots a little more after this impulsive first attempt; they decide that they actually would make sense as partners for multiple jobs. They get educated on all things bank robberies from Bill (Sam Shepard), a local legend who comes highly recommended. (He’s said to have emptied out 37 institutions and gotten away with it.)
Hayek and Cruz make for a lovable duo working out, for almost all the movie, the kinks that come when you’re united by a common cause but come from backgrounds so vastly different that dissimilarities seem like they could go down all the way to how breaths are taken. Hayek and Cruz find a way to make their characters’ frequent arguments not grating but funny — like sororal spats you know will eventually give way for productive peace. It’s a pleasure simply watching the duo, so often talked about in the same breath (despite Cruz being a white European), be in the same movie together, making obvious the real-life friendship that’s gone on long enough for Cruz to recently liken it to sisterhood. The movie, whose premise is maybe too straightforward to completely carry a full film, coasts on their charming camaraderie.
Penélope Cruz and Salma Hayek in Bandidas.
It’s dulled somewhat by the mid-movie ubiquity of Steve Zahn, who’s introduced early in Bandidas as a criminal investigator with something of a sixth sense. He comes down from New York to Mexico to investigate what’s going on not just with Sara and María, whose faces are plastered all over town on crinkled most-wanted posters in no time, but also with the baron, who’s been managing to buy properties at an extremely suspicious 1 peso a pop. Screenwriters Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen write him in not merely as an ally to the bandidas but also as the third part of an unnecessary love triangle.
I can handle him, even if I’d prefer he not be there, assisting in the robberies; there’s an inspired one where Hayek has to walk on ice skates to avoid triggering a just-added alarm system. But it’s hard not to groan when, in an early scene, Cruz and Hayek try blackmailing his character by stripping him naked, tying him to a bed, and making him pose with them, disguised by showgirl outfits, for some incriminating pictures. The scene descends into them practicing kissing on him, since María’s character has ostensibly never been with a man; the whole scene reeks of straight men wanting to see Hayek and Cruz engage in some threesome-style shenanigans.
Aside from that unwelcome blip, Bandidas is an otherwise likable throwback to the low-budget B Westerns of the 1970s, effective in its comedy but more so its action, which peaks with its slo-mo train-set climax. I recall a reviewer opining that Robert Rodriguez, who at that time was consistently proving his flair for modern pulp filmmaking, would have been better-suited material. I try not to think about that because it’s true.
Peterson Reviews 