Imagine a musician turned avenging angel, with a guitar case full of guns and the martial arts skills of Steven Seagal, shooting, stabbing and blowing up stupid bad guys in a small Mexican town. Sounds like another B-movie from cable hell, right? It’s not.

All the clichs are there the tougher and smarter than anyone hero, (Antonio I wish I looked like that guy’ Banderas), a blindingly beautiful not-so-smart damsel in distress, (Salma Hayek) swarms of stupid ugly bad guys who can’t aim and tons and tons of bullets hitting everyone but the hero and the girl.

Desperado is a Columbia Pictures release, so it has a decent budget ($7 million, I heard, although it looks like $30 million on-screen.) It also has the intelligence and originality of an independent film. Writer-director-producer Robert Rodriguez, the mad genius behind this movie’s prequel El Mariachi, has created a film that makes no sense so consistently that we feel comfortable with what we see despite its lunacy. And it’s smart, oh so smart.

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The point of an action movie is to amaze, to thrill, to cause the audience to say wow, I can’t believe he did that. The important difference in Desperado is the audience is in on the movie-makers little secret:it’s all contrived, all about showing you something a little crazier than ever before. Rodriguez, from behind the camera, seems to say to the viewer, hold on, we all know this is a big game. Look what we can do if we stop limiting ourselves by pretending this could be reality.

Every scene goes beyond mere storytelling. Rodriguez is constantly nudging his audience, reminding them that he likes them and is there to entertain and amaze, not preach mass morality or make one more bland statement about the blurred lines between good and evil.

The action is outrageous. Banderas’ Mariachi proves early on he is invulnerable when he slaughters a tavern full of drug smugglers. There, in one of many creatively choreographed death scenes, a villain who tries to jump a prone Banderas is kicked back up into the air and riddled with bullets before crashing through a cheap bar table.

Violence is rampant, but with the sensational feel of a magic show, not the grim bloodbaths usually found in films about revenge. There is always irony in the gore blood and guts become props, the make-up experts straight men to Rodrigues’ dialogue with the audience. Anyone who saw Vincent Vega accidentally blow an accomplice’s brains out all over the inside of his car in Pulp Fiction knows blood and guts can be hysterical when the audience is allowed to see it for what it is a show, for their benefit.

Cheech Marin and Quentin Tarantino, billed as supporting actors, have shown up prominintly in several previews, but their roles are really just cameos that are over in the first ten minutes. Tarantino, a jumpy smuggler from the north, tells a dirty joke to Marin, a mean and lazy bartender, and both ham it up as characters they’ve pretty much played a hundred times.

I loved Desperado because I felt no need to point its obvious inconsistencies with reality. Movies about people shooting each other are improbable by definition, and usually annoying for the same reason, but Rodriguez respects his audience too much to ask them to believe what they see.