+ Silliest Movie of the Year
 |
| Salma Hayek and Penélope Cruz before a setting sun on the poster for Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg's Bandidas |
QUICK REVIEW:
Two curvaceous latino girls rob banks to fight a corrupt American banker's take-over of Mexican land and gold. The pair becomes a trio, when an investigator from New York joins them.
This part is played by Steve Zahn (Rescue Dawn (2006)), and country musician/actor Dwight Yoakum (Safe Room (2002)) plays a decent villain in the film.
Bandidas is a French-Mexican-American co-production and feels roughly as authentic as a Greek kung fu movie; characteristic for the film's producer/co-writer, French movie tycoon Luc Besson (Leon (1994)), whose films often stand alone with their wholly own kind of mediocrity and uncoolness.
Bandidas looks like a soft drink commercial throughout and is packed with all the various elements that Besson obviously believes that a 'real' western must have. But the film comes closer to being a colorful pastiche of the genre than a real entry into it.
However, at the centre of Bandidas stand two divine women: Penélope Cruz (Volver (2006)) and Salma Hayek (Frida (2002)), and they are both wonderful to behold and add to a certain entertainment value that the high-paced film undeniably has.
Westerns are and have always been perhaps the most male-dominated of all genres, and this is a fact that Bandidas definitely did not change in 2006. It is a very silly film. For this, it has probably annoyed hot-blooded feminists around the world, (if such persons ever notice or care about western movies ...), - but that is no reason it should annoy anyone else.
 |
| Salma Hayek and Penélope Cruz lend their irresistible selves to the otherwise unspectacular Bandidas |
The film is directed by Norwegian director-pair, Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg, who has since directed the excellent WWII resistance thriller Max Manus (2008) and the Oscar-nominated Kon-Tiki (2012). They are now signed on to direct Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (2016), and have thus moved up into the absolute super-league of the movie biz. They probably learned a lesson or two on Bandidas...
Related post:
2006 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED I]
Watch the trailer for Bandidas here
Budget: 35 mil. $
Box office: 18.3 mil. $
= Financial disaster
Other women-led westerns that you can name?
What do you think of Bandidas?
No comments:
Post a Comment