Luc Besson Conquers the Wild West
Director of huge successes, prolific producer and screenwriter, highly controversial personality in the cinema, Luca Besson he would like to be discreet in order not to succeed: his mark on the cinema of the last 30 years is too important to be ignored. For better or for worse. In fact, under the aegis of his production and distribution company EuropaCorp, Luc Besson has alternated great successes at the world box office with largely mediocre productions, both from an economic and critical point of view. Among these there is in particular a project a priori interesting but in the end it became perfectly anecdotal, co-written and produced by him: Bandida.
A very attractive star couple
In the mid-2000s, producing a western with a classic plot was a challenge. A few years ago, Wild Wild West indicated a possible path: approaching the western from the point of view of comedy, relying on a casting gifted enough to make the gags work and make the transgression of the genre’s codes funny at best, painless at worst.
This is the declared ambition of Bandidawhich brings together for the first time two great female stars of the time, Penelope Cruz AND Salma Hayek. Together, they form a seemingly discordant duo of two big-hearted bank robbers, as attractive as they are effective when it comes to bringing justice and taking down the evil American capitalist who killed their fathers and ruined the lives of the Mexican population.
Mexico, 1880. Sara Sandoval (Salma Hayek) is the daughter of a wealthy banker. Maria Alvarez (Penélope Cruz) is the daughter of a poor peasant. These two young women, who apparently have nothing in common except their Mexican culture, are dragged into the same adventure by fate and circumstance.
With the help of Quentin Cooke, a young and idealistic New York police inspector, they will oppose Tyler Jackson, the representative of the New York Bank and Trust. He has organized a plot to illegally take Mexican land to pass the railroad…
“Not funny, not rhythmic, not bad, just slightly stupid”
If Bandida seeks originality, so it is neither in its script, sewn with white thread, nor in the universe in which it is set, common to the point of caricature. It is therefore its duo of adorable heroines and their very advantageous plastics Bandida wears her accent. We are in a Besson, who loves heroines also, if not above all, for the display of their femininity. But there is nothing original in this either, and Penélope Cruz and Salma Hayek try and show off their talent as actresses, especially in the performance of some successful comedy sequencesthis is far from sufficient.
In the end, critics find nothing to save, but not much to condemn either. Bandida. For example, Télérama writes of the film co-directed by Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg that “It’s not funny, it’s not rhythmic, it’s not bad, it’s just slightly stupidBy giving it another score of 3/5, Libération does not fail to underline the very heterosexual and masculine direction of the film:
“Bandidas”, by Joachim Roenning and Espen Sandberg, should satisfy those allergic to the virile love of “Brokeback Mountain” with a female western starring the buxom couple Salma Hayek and Penélope Cruz.
Judged by others as “not unpleasant” (Le Monde) or even “pleasant” (Le Parisien), only the beauty of its main interpreters seems to constitute the main argument of the Bandida. But this is not enough and the public does not follow it. In France only 395,000 spectators travel. And the film went unnoticed in the United States, where in the end it did not have a wide distribution. Result of the competitions, for a substantial budget of $35 million, Bandida only reports $18.4 million at the worldwide box office…
The failure is bitter, but it does not have dramatic consequences. It is neither the first nor the last for Luc Besson, Salma Hayek and Penélope Cruz continue their brilliant careers, and directors Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg, for whom this is their first feature film, will later experience success with Kon Tiki in 2012 and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales in 2017.
Source: Cine Serie
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