E-Mail This Article to a Friend ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO

Johnny Depp’s performance in Pirates of the Caribbean was enough to convince many that it was the film of the summer, but his antics won’t save Robert Rodriguez’s misbegotten and incoherent third installment in the series begun with El Mariachi. He plays a scene-stealing renegade CIA agent setting all sides against the middle in the Mexican drug war, stirring up a morass of plots that profits no one, least of all the viewer. Abetting Depp is a rogue’s gallery of actors: Willem Dafoe as a sneering cartel kingpin; Mickey Rourke as his world-weary gringo enforcer; Cheech Marin as an informer, a holdout from Desperado, the second film in the series. (I’m surprised Christopher Walken didn’t get a call.) As for Antonio Banderas as El Mariachi, the gloomy guitar-strumming avenger, he’s almost irrelevant, and so is Salma Hayek, his paramour from the previous film, who appears in perfunctory flashbacks. The title would make it seem that Rodriguez is straining for the epic scope of Sergio Leone’s Once upon a Time in the West (or Leone’s more pretentious Once upon a Time in America), but not only can’t he keep the story straight, he muddles the action scenes as well. Unlike the stark clarity of Leone’s visuals, those in Mexico splatter the foreground like bugs on a windshield. (101 minutes)