PERDITA DURANGO came late in the 1990s glut of violent, darkly comic couples-on-the-run road movies which was initiated by David Lynch's WILD AT HEART. A few minor characters from WILD AT HEART appear in PERDITA DURANGO, but director Alex de la Iglesia seems to have modeled his film not on Lynch's lyrical surrealism, but on the ham-fisted satire of Oliver Stone's NATURAL BORN KILLERS (or, even worse, Gregg Araki's THE DOOM GENERATION). (I also saw the Barry Gifford novella this was based on as a let-down from Gifford's original source novel for WILD AT HEART; as the novella also relied on mindless shock value, PERDITA does seem to have captured its spirit well.)
Romeo (Javier Bardem) and Perdita (Rosie Perez) are the "charismatic" heroes of the film, smuggling human fetuses and kidnapping a teenage American couple for a voodoo sacrifice. Iglesia depicts the teens in broadly caricatured fashion, and the viewer apparently is supposed to find their abuse at the hands of the older couple "funny". I don't object to black comedy per se, but that subgenre usually deals with sudden death (as in the man accidentally getting his head blown off in the backseat in PULP FICTION), while here the filmmakers expect us to be "amused" at prolonged suffering. Aimee Graham, playing the female half of the teen couple, strives to make her character more human and sympathetic, but it's not something the filmmakers will let her get away with. The impression given is that we are to prefer the south-of-the-border couple's uninhibited, self-destructive lifestyle over the American couple's suburban blandness-- Romeo and Perdita are more "authentic", I guess. (Do many artists still have that old Holden Caulfield worldview?) The only bit that really amused me is that both the killers and the suburbanites are Herb Alpert fans-- if that's "satire", though, I don't see the point.
The whole Starkweather/Fugate-derived violent road movie genre has been squeezed dry for at least a decade now. There have been great movies with amoral/psychopathic protagonists before (textbook example: A CLOCKWORK ORANGE), but PERDITA just isn't one of them.
