The Movie: Once Upon a Time in Mexico is the third and final film in Robert Rodriguez' El Mariachi series, and in my opinion, the least satisfying. With a budget of nearly $30,000,000 in a lot of ways it was just too polished and was missing the low budget charm of its predecessors El Mariachi and Desperado.

Antonio Banderas is back as "El Mariachi", and this film's got more of the same stuff. Of the three films, it's probably the least memorable, although there are a number of good action scenes. In this film, a U.S. government agent played by Johnny Depp enlists the help of El Mariachi in taking down a corrupt Mexican general.

The story is disjointed and hard to follow, and overall this film just isn't as satisfying as the previous two. I might even go so far as to say to not waste your time with it.

The DVD: The video transfer I'm inclined to believe is not really a transfer at all, as this film was shot on high definition video, and I'm reasonably certain that the DVD was made straight from the original digital source and not from a film print. The result is a very clean, sharp image with bold, saturated colors. It certainly looks fantastic. The audio track is also quite clean with some nice use of the surround channels for various ambient effects.

Special features include deleted scenes, directors commentary, and a number of featurettes, including "Ten Minute Flick School", "Ten Minute Cooking School", a tour into Rodriguez' home movie studio, and a video of Robert Rodriguez speaking to a group of industry people about the virtues of digital filmmaking.

Following in the footsteps of the previous "Ten Minute" featurettes which came on the DVDs of the two previous Mariachi films, "Ten Minute Flick School" was the least satisfying of the three films as in the previous editions we saw many tips and tricks related to making a big-budget looking movie on a low budget. But here all we saw was "everything is digital, so I can make it look good with this fancy expensive computer that I own because I'm a millionaire now".

So rather than giving us insight into all the physical tricks and effects, we're basically just told that everything was done in a computer. Nothing particularly exciting about that to a movie viewer in this day and age! There's nothing particularly interesting or entertaining about watching a process that works smoothly because you can afford everything you need to get the film done. Of course, despite budget being much larger than the two previous films, this one did still come in as being a relatively low budget film... though not quite to the degree of Desperado, and definitely not to the degree of El Mariachi which was made for $7,000.

I do have to say though that the featurettes do give you a look into just how talented a man Robert Rodriguez is, giving us some insight into his process where he shoots, edits and even composes the music for the film all by himself, all at his house. And that I do have to admit, is pretty impressive.

So basically of the three "Mariachi" films, this is the least entertaining and of the DVD releases, this one also has the least satisfying special features. This DVD gets a sold "meh" from me!