Bandidas knows exactly what kind of movie it wants to be: a breezy, good-looking western comedy that trades grit for glamour and mostly gets away with it. Directors Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg — making their feature debut here, years before steering a Pirates of the Caribbean sequel — keep the pace light and the action sequences playful rather than punishing. It borrows its odd-couple, opposites-team-up structure from a dozen buddy movies before it and doesn't pretend otherwise. What it has that most of them don't is two enormous stars clearly enjoying themselves, and that goes a long way.
Salma Hayek and Penélope Cruz are the whole show, and their first onscreen pairing has an easy, bickering chemistry that papers over the film's thinner plotting. Hayek's brash farm girl and Cruz's prim heiress make for a satisfying mismatch, each getting moments to subvert her own stereotype as the story goes on. Steve Zahn, as the bumbling forensics expert training them, supplies reliable comic relief without overstaying his welcome, and Dwight Yoakam makes a serviceably slimy villain. None of it is subtle, but the cast sells the fun with enough conviction that the seams rarely show.
Hayek and Cruz robbing banks in matching outfits, having more fun than the plot deserves.
This is a lightweight watch for anyone wanting a western with less dust and more banter — pitched closer to an action-comedy caper than a gritty genre exercise. It's not aiming for prestige, and it shouldn't be judged like it is. If you want to see two of the biggest actresses of the era clearly having a blast robbing banks in matching outfits, Bandidas delivers exactly that, no more and no less. Go in expecting a fun, disposable Saturday-afternoon movie and you'll get your money's worth.
Bandidas was the feature directorial debut of Norwegian filmmaking duo Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg, who later went on to direct Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales in Hollywood. It was produced by EuropaCorp, the French studio founded by Luc Besson, who also co-wrote the screenplay, alongside French co-production partners TF1 Films and Canal+. The film brought together Salma Hayek and Penélope Cruz for the first time on screen, pairing two of the most prominent Latina actresses working internationally at the time in a story set in 1880s Mexico about two women turned outlaws.
On release, Bandidas received mixed reviews, holding around a 56% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes, with much of the praise directed at Hayek and Cruz's chemistry and criticism aimed at the formulaic plotting. Commercially, the film underperformed relative to its roughly $35 million budget, earning about $18.4 million worldwide. Despite the modest box office, it has retained a following as an easy, star-driven comfort watch, helped by its two leads' popularity and the novelty of seeing them share the screen for the first time in a genre neither was closely associated with beforehand.
Much of Bandidas was shot on location in northern Mexico, with the crew spending roughly fourteen weeks in and around Durango and the Sierra de Órganos National Park near Sombrerete, real desert landscapes that give the film's western backdrops more texture than its plotting usually earns. Hayek and Cruz have said their real-life friendship bled straight into the shoot — one scene with Steve Zahn reportedly took three full days to complete because the trio kept breaking into laughter between takes, unable to keep straight faces through their own bit. That off-camera ease is part of why the chemistry reads as genuine rather than performed, even when the script around them is coasting on convention.
