DVD Review: Bandidas

(andPOP) - Bandidas was written by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen, who wrote The Fifth Element, and stars Salma Hayek and Penelope Cruz. If none of those names mean anything to you, or (in Besson's case) send you screaming for the hills, keep running. Bandidas has nothing to offer.

Those of you who are fans of Hayek (like me) and/or Cruz (I wasn't, but after Volver...) will simply read this review hoping I'll answer a few questions, and given that Besson and Kamen are the men who dressed Milla Jovovich in duct tape and had Chris Tucker playing a transsexual radio host prone to breaking out into "All Night Long" in a futuristic Bruce Willis movie, let us agree they're not going to be the same questions you'd ask if I was evaluating, say, Volver or Frida.

For instance, are Cruz and/or Hayek the first people we see? (No, that would be Steve Zahn's Quentin, an early New York forensics detective who ends up getting called down to Mexico.)

How many minutes of this movie do not have Penelope Cruz or Salma Hayek in them? (Between five and ten, and three and a half of them are in the beginning.)

Is there a cat fight? (Yes. They even pull on each others' hair.)

When the film is rated PG-13 for "sexuality, nudity, and violence," is it because...? (No. That honour again belongs to Mr. Zahn, who in an awkward moment ends up displaying his naked rear end for the screen. As compensation he gets to make out with both stars. Twice. Lucky bastard.)

When I said that in Volver Penelope Cruz played a terrific character, it's because she turned a selfish woman who has problems with her mother, a slightly rebellious daughter, an unemployed deadbeat husband, and two jobs she just lost into a likable character. In Bandidas I say she plays a good character because Besson and Kamen go with the Robin Hood archetype; greedy bankers kill her father, a farmer living in turn-of-the-last-century Mexico, and she vows to rob from the rich and distribute her wealth to the poor. Simple, entertaining, easy to latch onto (Hayek plays a rich girl in a similar situation, only her father owned the land before he was killed by the bankers). In Frida, I'm hoping Julie Taymor took a compelling, artistic approach in presenting the very complicated work and life and inspiration of Frida Kahlo. Here I was just hoping the story was interesting enough to keep me watching Cruz and Hayek for 90 minutes.

Which brings us to our last question: was it? Yes, for the most part, it was. For the first 20 minutes, Cruz and Hayek are technically against each other, and during that time the movie's a bit slow going. Once they meet (hilariously) while robbing a bank, however, it kicks into gear. I will also point out the film is relentlessly silly: for instance, during an openly pointless training montage it's discovered that Hayek's character, Sara, who gets hiccups whenever she's nervous, can't shoot a gun to save her life. So she's given throwing knives, and of course she's great at throwing them. Of course. Cruz's horse is so good at listening to her she can stand on his back, ride him across a plank suspended precariously between two roofs, and turn off or on his libido with a whistle. The cartoonish villains, headed by country singer Dwight Yoakam (about 11 notches removed from his eerie performance in Sling Blade) are the kind dumb enough to start playing the banjo when they should be guarding a bank. And except for the fathers, no one ever seems to get permanently injured. Even a guy thrown off a moving train looks like he might as well have just been shoved down two or three stairs.

In terms of features, the screener had two: a "Burning Up The Set" featurette where Hayek and Cruz explain where the film came from (longtime friends, they hatched the idea as an excuse to work together and pitched it to Besson), talk about how much everyone enjoyed working with each other, and generally state the obvious, and an audio commentary with the two stars. Cruz and Hayek admit they've never done a DVD commentary before, but become more comfortable as it goes on. There are some good anecdotes, and their closeness is palpable.

My rating for Bandidas is a good example of the pointlessness of star ratings. I give it three stars, but can assure you enjoyed it more than Borat, which I gave four, and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest and Talladega Nights, which I gave three and a half.