Trailer
Plot summary
Somewhere in Mexico, a traveling musician called El Mariachi carries a guitar case packed with weapons. The man he is looking for is Bucho, the drug lord whose underling murdered his lover and crippled his left hand. Word of El Mariachi's work reaches the Tarasco bar, where an American named Buscemi tells the patrons about a massacre committed by a man with such a case; they listen only when Bucho's name comes up. El Mariachi kills several of Bucho's henchmen at the bar, and Tavo, who does illegal business in a back room there, follows him outside and wounds him. Carolina, a bookstore owner he shielded from Tavo's bullets, takes him in and treats his injuries. Bucho, alarmed by the killing, orders his men to hunt El Mariachi down.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Desperado (1995)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
SPOILER
The MPAA initially slapped Desperado with an NC-17 for graphic violence, and the cuts it demanded to the climactic mansion shootout were so extensive that Robert Rodriguez scrapped the sequence entirely, which is why the film simply fades out instead of ending in a full battle.- Raúl Juliá was originally cast to play Bucho, but he died on October 24, 1994, before production on Desperado even began.
- Because Antonio Banderas replaced Carlos Gallardo as the lead when Desperado followed El Mariachi, the filmmakers had to reshoot El Mariachi's original final showdown as a flashback featuring Banderas, while Gallardo himself stayed on to play a different character, Campa.
- Salma Hayek became visibly uncomfortable and started crying while filming her sex scene with Antonio Banderas, though she later said director Robert Rodriguez and Banderas were both supportive and that Rodriguez never pressured her.
- Two scenes built around a hidden "codpiece gun" in El Mariachi's guitar case were cut from Desperado, but Robert Rodriguez later brought the same prop gimmick back in his unrelated films From Dusk till Dawn and Machete Kills.
- Figure skater Nathan Chen used the film's "Canción del Mariachi" as the music for his 2020-21 short program, skating in a costume closely resembling Banderas' black pants and white shirt from the film.
- The "Canción del Mariachi" heard at the start of the film is regularly used by Spanish-Georgian UFC fighter Ilia Topuria as his walkout song in the octagon.
