Not so wild

Perdita Durango gets Lynched

by Scott Heller

PERDITA DURANGO, Directed by Alex de la Iglesia. Written by Barry Gifford, Jorge Guerricaechevarría, David Trueba, and Alex de la Iglesia. With Rosie Perez, Javier Bardem, Harley Cross, Aimee Graham, James Gandolfini, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Santiago Segura, and Alex Cox. At the Brattle Theatre April 23 through 29.

When last we saw the she-wolf named Perdita Durango, she was bottle-blonde and looked a lot like Isabella Rossellini. This was in David Lynch's Wild at Heart, where Perdita appeared midway through as the girlfriend of Willem Dafoe's memorably grimy Bobby Peru. Mostly they were there to get in the way of Nicolas Cage & Laura Dern's volcanic duo, Sailor and Lula.

Working, as did Lynch, from a story by cult novelist Barry Gifford, Spain's Alex de la Iglesia has brought back Perdita as the title character of his own blood-splashed road movie. Rosie Perez plays the part, opposite Spanish heartthrob Javier Bardem (Live Flesh). Gifford gets credit for a piece of the script. Even James Gandolfini of The Sopranos makes an appearance. Yet Perdita Durango is a major misfire. And not a David Lynch misfire, either, the kind of movie you hate, don't understand, but can't forget. Spottily acted and achingly long, the film demonstrates that cult classics don't get patched together out of someone else's discards.

De la Iglesia has earned a following for his comic-book-inspired jabs at Spanish piety, like the church-bashing Day of the Beast, which sold out several recent Brattle Theatre screenings. Filming in English for the first time, he's on unfamiliar turf in Perdita Durango, which trolls through the sleaziest precincts of the US-Mexican border. It's at a border checkpoint that Perdita, all cleavage and black fingernails, meets her match in the voodoo-spouting killer Romeo Dolorosa. She dreams of being devoured by jaguars; he's the kind of guy who wears snakeskin boots with the heads still attached. He also has a thing for santeria, allowing de la Iglesia to stage ritual-sacrifice sequences that are more silly than scary.

Bardem's wild-eyed performance and often garbled English don't help matters. Perez, a usually lively screen presence, seems bored, as if wondering why her character's name is in the title when Romeo's antics get more screen time. Screamin' Jay Hawkins manages to hold his head high as Romeo's mentor in the dark arts.

Jumping back and forth across the border in a predictable crime spree, Perdita and Romeo kidnap a pair of white-bread American kids, Estelle and Duane, who both fear and are fascinated by their outlaw captors. Meanwhile, a mob boss named Mad Eyes and various officers of the law follow close behind. Sex, blood, altars, handcuffs -- all the trappings of bad-boy cinema, all of it adding up to very little. Perdita Durango has a few choice lines ("What are your goals?'' she asks a trussed Duane. "Every good American boy has goals.'') and the movie makes fine use of its trashy locales. What's missing is anything underneath the cheap surface thrills. Weirdly excessive and psychosexually grotesque, Wild at Heart was just plain more disturbing.

Heartened by the response to Day of the Beast, and hoping that cult-movie lightning will strike twice, the Brattle is giving this film its US premiere. Good try, wrong movie. Mild at heart, Perdita Durango makes David Lynch look like David Lean.