In 1995 Robert Rodriguez unleashed Desperado onto the movie-going public. A remake/sequel to Rodriguez’s low-budget debut El Mariachi, Desperado stars Antonio Banderas as El Mariachi, a musician uniquely gifted in the art of destruction who goes on a rampage of revenge after a mysterious drug kingpin kills his girlfriend. Over the course of 105 lean minutes, Rodriguez treats the viewer to Danny Trejo as a knife-hurling killer, endless gunfights, and a bazooka hidden in a guitar case.And how does Rodriguez choose to introduce the viewer to such mind-bending mayhem? With Steve Buscemi.Whether you are familiar with Buscemi’s varied and fantastic career or just know him as the guy from the “Fellow Kids” meme, he would at a glance seem an unlikely choice for an action movie intro. Physically slight with piercing eyes and soft lips, Buscemi hardly looks like a guy who can strike terror into a bunch of toughs in a Mexican dive bar. And yet, that’s exactly what happens in the first scene of Desperado.cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});The film opens with Buscemi’s character, helpfully named Buscemi (no, really!), entering the bar and shrugging off the dirty stares tossed his way by the patrons and the bartender (Cheech Marin). After ordering a drink, Buscemi starts prattling on about how lucky he is to be alive, and how he was just at another bar where he witnessed an act of unspeakable violence. At first no one believes him, yet the constant jokes at his expense by other patrons seem to encourage Buscemi more. The more insults, the more grandiloquent his prose becomes.“It was as if he was always walking in a shadow. I mean, every step he took towards the light—just when you thought his face was about to be revealed—it wasn’t,” Buscemi as Buscemi intones. “It was as if the lights dimmed, just for him.” Slowly Buscemi’s tale compels the other patrons, even as they can’t help but continue their jokes, if only to settle their rapidly unraveling nerves.But then Buscemi reveals the reason for the shadowy killer’s visit to the bar in his story. The stranger is looking for someone, a person called, “Bucho.” At the sound of this name, the bartender and patrons listening to Buscemi exchange nervous glances with one another. They’re now listen very intently as Buscemi goes on to describe how the man wreaked havoc.Buscemi’s speech perfectly sets up Banderas’ hero, giving him an entry every bit as iconic as Indiana Jones entering Raiders of the Lost Ark or the Dark Knight preparing to confront some crooks in Batman (1989). It works, in part, because cut aways to Buscemi’s fanciful story allows Rodriguez to do the wild, kinetic action that is his stock in trade. To show the images and fears running through the patrons’ minds, Rodriguez fills the screen with pistol flares and explosions, cutting to close-up of Banderas’ eyes piercing through his fallen tresses and filling the soundtrack with Los Lobos’s wailing guitar rock. The mythic nature of Buscemi’s tall tale-spinning means Rodriguez doesn’t even need to pay passing lip service to “reality” or verisimilitude.Just as important to the proceedings, however, is the fact that the narration comes from Buscemi. There’s a wryness to the actor’s delivery, as if he’s daring the patrons to dismiss him. He knows full well that they can beat him up, and he’s giving them reason to do so. But he also knows that they fear for their lives, that this mythic avenger will come for them next, so Buscemi laces the slightest bit of irony in his delivery, mocking their fright.The joking goes no further than that. Rodriguez may have broken into Hollywood alongside Quentin Tarantino, who appears later in the film as a joking bar patron, but Desperado has no interest in winking postmodernism. Rodriguez plays every note straight, from El Mariachi’s single-minded mission, to the malevolent evil that Joaquim de Almeida imbues in Bucho, to the passionate romance between El Mariachi and Carolina (Salma Hayek).And that’s exactly why the opening works so well. Desperado isn’t a rich text, full of complex themes and ideas. It’s a straightforward revenge Western, notable for how well Rodriguez et al. execute a standard genre. To draw attention away from the simplicity of the story—the rawness of the emotion or the excess of the violence—would undercut the entire thing, and make it all laughable.Which is why Buscemi’s exaggerated introduction works so well. Even if he’s doing an over-the-top description of the movie’s hero, he does so on a way that draws all possible laughter onto himself. We can poke fun at him, but not at the hero of our movie. No, whatever the tone Buscemi adopts, the images make clear that the destruction wrought by El Mariachi isn’t a joke. It’s a promise fulfilled by the time the credits roll on Desperado.The post Desperado: How Steve Buscemi Became One of the Greatest Hype Men in Cinema appeared first on Den of Geek.