Having seen and disliked Robert Rodriguez's From Dusk Till Dawn a couple of months before I got around to Desperado, I wasn't expecting too much from the director's previous effort. Pleasant surprise -- Desperado is stylish and intriguing right from the opening scenes. Before the credits roll, Steve Buscemi, in the role of "Buscemi," wanders smugly into a bar in the little border town of Santa Cecilia, and orders a piss-warm Chango beer. He tells the sundry assorted cretins a little campfire story about a similar joint in Sarasota, just down the road, where the biggest Mexican you've ever seen strolled in, ordered a soda pop, deposited his guitar case next to the bar, and asked about a guy named Bucho. Suddenly everybody is all ears as Buscemi explains, with the help of flashbacks, just how that big Mexican proceeded to pull heavy artillery out of his guitar case and kill everyone in the place.

Well, in this, the year of our unreliable narrator, it turns out that Buscemi was telling a tall tale, just to suss out the joint and figure out if this guy Bucho hangs out anywhere close by. Buscemi is a pal of that not-so-big Mexican, who used to be a mariachi, a guitar player, until one of Bucho's men killed his lover and shot him through his fret hand. El Mariachi is played to the smoldering hilt by Antonio Banderas, who nurtures that slow, vengeful burn on into the first major gunfight, which has him blasting his way out of a bad situation in outrageous high style -- in terms of audacious impact, it's sort of the Mexican dive bar equivalent of the teahouse scene that opens John Woo's Hard Boiled.

Since Desperado is nothing if not formulaic, Banderas finds his love interest in short order. Carolina is played by Salma Hayek, and the movie's best joke may be the bookstore/coffee shop she's opened in the middle of this desert town. We soon learn that it doesn't matter whether she has any customers, because, like everyone else in town, she's in thrall to Bucho, who pays her off to facilitate drug deals. And when Bucho figures out that she's been harboring the man who's trying to finish him off, he decides to rub her out, too.

So much for the storyline, and so much for the best part of the picture. The second half of Desperado wallows in more chase scenes, bullet showers, and crazy stunts as Bucho and El Mariachi hunt each other down. We see a not-bad rooftop chase sequence, a rather awkward sex scene, a numbing heavy-artillery gunfight (with a couple of supporting characters who materialize out of nowhere and disappear as quickly), and a lame revelation back at Bucho's headquarters -- and then the movie's over.

It's some kind of accomplishment, to be sure. Desperado was made for $7 million, which is half of Demi Moore's salary and about a fourth of what your typical studio executive would probably expect to spend on a "cheap" action picture. (It's also about $6,993,000 more than Rodriguez spent on his debut feature, El Mariachi, which Desperado loosely remakes.) The action scenes are crisp and exciting, and Rodriguez has a sure eye for high-impact photography. For a picture that obviously couldn't afford the bucks for such luxuries as special effects and retakes, Desperado sure delivers the goods (it makes good use of such cost-cutters as recycled stuntpeople in every fight scene, savvy editing, and the famed "guacamole gun," which delivers grue on a shoestring by splattering the blood out of the barrel of the pistol and onto the face/body/head of the victim). All this having been said, Desperado's best feature is still its sense of humor, which keeps the movie from drowning in a sea of hip testosterone.

But even if Rodriguez has the John Woo stylistics down to a science (he does), they seem facile when recycled here. He does for Banderas what Woo did for Chow Yun-Fat, but Chow was never so glib in his heroics as is Banderas, who prances across the room, shooting villains dead with his hand behind his back. And while Desperado may be fun while it lasts, it's lacking in character. Say what you like about Woo's American career, but his trend-setting Hong Kong films were resonant beyond their set pieces -- The Killer, Bullet in the Head, and, hell, Hard Boiled were all about more than gunfights. "You know, it's easier to pull the trigger than play guitar," admits El Mariachi toward the end of Desperado. "Easier to destroy than create." As movies go, Desperado is a great big assault weapon with the trigger squeezed hard. It's effective, but it crosses a line -- there's only so much of the same old rat-a-tat-a-tat that you can really take.