Desperado (1995)

Nic picks the movie, and he picks one that wormed into his teenage brain during the blockbuster-video era of the mid-'90s: 1995's Desperado, Robert Rodriguez's stylish, blood-spurting follow-up to El Mariachi and the second chapter of his unofficial Mariachi trilogy. Back then it played like a revelation. Two guns at once. A ponytail with strategic strands falling out. Salma Hayek crossing the street so beautifully two cars crash trying to look at her. The question this week is whether any of that still works, or whether it lands in the Boondock Saints-shaped pit of "I can't believe I thought this was cool."

Steve, an admitted college-era insufferable film student, somehow never got around to this one despite worshipping Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, so he comes in fresh. What he finds is an Antonio Banderas vehicle so committed to looking awesome it occasionally forgets about gravity, physics, and bullet trajectories. Both dads spend a happy stretch cataloguing the moves: the wrist-flicking gun mime, the guitar-case rocket launcher operated like a Little League catcher dropping into stance, Danny Trejo dialing a payphone with the tip of a throwing knife. The cold open belongs to Steve Buscemi and his "world-class turds" speech. Quentin Tarantino swans in to tell a piss joke and later gets shot in the head for his trouble. The squibs work overtime.

Then comes the second half, and both dads start finding cracks. There's a "make it look like an accident" line that derails Bucho's whole logic. There's a sex scene followed by El Mariachi inexplicably wearing his boots in bed. And there's a late-breaking family revelation that lands somewhere between homage and shrug. Whether any of it costs the movie its swagger is for Steve and Nic to argue. Desperado doesn't always make sense, but neither does throwing a knife into a bulletproof limo like it's a grenade.