I own "Perdita Durango" on DVD since more than two years already, but always felt a little reluctant to watch it because, somehow, I feared it wouldn't be as overwhelming as it looks. I'm a big fan of Alex De La Iglesia's bizarrely experimental occult-horror gem "The Day of the Beast", but this is more like an attempt to cash-in on the contemporary popular trend of 'likeable criminals on the run' road movies, inspired by "Wild at Heart" and "Natural Born Killers". And, let's face it, De La Iglesia may be a creative and talented filmmaker, but he definitely isn't on par with big shots like David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino. And there you immediately have Perdita Durango's main problem
It tries to be exactly like the two aforementioned films and MORE, as our overactive director also wants to implement an extra subplot about the sadistic sacrificing rites of a religious cult led by one of the two main characters. The titular character, adequately played by Rosie Perez, is a tough and foul-mouthed little Mexican thug who hangs around airports on the boarder of Texas. She only gets sucked into the criminal underworld for real when she falls for Romeo Dolorosa. Romeo is the bloodthirsty and trigger-happy leader of the insane Santeria-church as well as an employee of the feared Mexican mob boss Santos. When he's hired to transport a truckload of frigid human fetuses for the cosmetic industry to Las Vegas, Perdita accompanies him and the happy couple even finds the time to kidnap two young teenagers to sexually abuse and humiliate along the way. Perdita Durango isn't really the main character, Romeo is! He's the one who always gets in trouble and has to face mighty enemies like malevolent mob creditors and unstoppable FBI-agents. Perdita's main occupation involves saving Romeo's butt when he once again messes up things! The script is incredibly incoherent and implausible, because it's just too hard to amalgamate plot elements like kidnapping, virgin sacrifice and mafia business deals. How are you supposed to take Romeo serious as a relentless criminal, when he also performs crazy voodoo dances around the fire and prays to Satan? Perdita Durango's reputation of being a cruel and extremely violent thriller is also very exaggerated. The film contains a handful of memorable shootouts and an occasional sadistic killing, but it's overall rather tame and politically correct. I particularly appreciated Alex De La Iglesia's "Day of the Beast" because it spawned an incredibly pleasant sense of black humor and morbid situations. This film hardly features any black humor, unless you consider James Gandolfini's cop-character repeatedly getting hit by cars as humor. His character is supposed to be an obsessive cop, but he's more like a crash-test-dummy. The film also is at least half an hour too long.
Review of Perdita Durango
