From Mexico With Love
2009, PG-13, 98 min. Directed by Jimmy Nickerson. Starring Kuno Becker, Steven Bauer, Bruce McGill, Angelíca Aragón, Danay Garcia, Alex Nesic, Stephen Lang, Carl Ciarfalio, Steve Bilich.
REVIEWED By Marc Savlov, Fri., Oct. 16, 2009
Not to be confused with either Once Upon a Time in Mexico or From Russia With Love, the title becomes a delightfully subversive Hollywood amalgam only after you've seen the picture. This up-from-the-fields slice of Tejano pride is a punchy, melodramatic piece of tried-and-true Americana that mixes cultures (and film genres) with an eye toward knocking down borders both cultural and contemporary. The script, by Glen Hartford and Nicholas Siapkaris, owes a sizable debt to pretty much every other boxing film that's come before, but that's not necessarily a bad thing when it's cast and executed with as much obvious body and soul as From Mexico With Love. Mexican heartthrob and bona fide película-idol Becker (Goal!) plays Hector, a Laredo field hand by day and a backroom brawler with a heart of gold by night. He gets a bass-ackwards shot at the (relative) big time when the local Great White Hope, Robert (Nesic), a scion of the local racist ranch master (Lang), sets his sights on Hector's up-from-down-South girlfriend, Maria (Garcia). Already living in desperate conditions – Madre Aragon is barely able to breathe and relies on covert inhaler deliveries from family friend Tito (Bauer) – Hector ends up on the wrong end of the border after a set-up scuffle. It's there that the kid finally winds up finding his Rocky-esque mentor, Billy (McGill), who also happens to have been recently employed as his nemesis' trainer. McGill, a former MacGyver regular and National Lampoon's Animal House's "D-Day,” is top sage in what is essentially a smartly directed and considerably shorter version of the telenovelas in which Becker made his name. Shot in and around San Antonio with a wealth of area talent, From Mexico With Love updates at least 12 rounds of other underdog and/or immigrant fighter films spanning back to Kid Galahad and probably beyond, but it does so with an amiable and welcome Tejano flourish. It's a new welt on an old abrasion, that same old last-minute left-hook aimed square and true (and, when you get right down to it, red, white, and blue), socking the inevitably hard-fought future right in the kisser, once more, with feeling.
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Marc Savlov, April 29, 2022
Marjorie Baumgarten, Oct. 25, 2013
Aug. 7, 2022
From Mexico With Love, Jimmy Nickerson, Kuno Becker, Steven Bauer, Bruce McGill, Angelíca Aragón, Danay Garcia, Alex Nesic, Stephen Lang, Carl Ciarfalio, Steve Bilich