I am not a fan of Steve Martin.  At all. Nor the other main actors (the other two amigos) in this movie, based on the types of movies I know them to usually be in.  When we started the film and I saw the cast, I thought I was going to hate it.  And at first, I didn’t like it, all I could see was stereotypes of Mexico.  A naive, uneducated, beautiful Mexican country girl, not having been exposed to film, we will assume, takes it to be reality, and writes to the Three Amigos for help.  It poked fun at the communication disconnect between Americans and Mexicans, which was fine.  But if you take it as representing actual people, Mexico, etc. it is quite offensive, or at least could be seen as such.

However, once I realized that it was not trying to represent Mexico so much as make fun of Hollywood and the old Western movies, I had a greater appreciation for the movie.  It alluded to the ignorance of so many big screen actors who represent people without knowing anything about them really.  Like Dusty asks if there is some other food, they don’t understand what the girl is asking of them, they through a fit at El Guapo when they realize it is real, and they keep saying the same lines over and over again, even when they realized it is not a show.  It also had so many allusions to Westerns, such as the Mexican villain and the Gringos who come in and save the day.  The unnecessary amount of shooting guns, drinking, mistreating women… etc.  The correspondences to the Wild Bunch (and other westerns, I am sure, I just haven’t seen many) were actually quite numerous once I stopped to think about them: the Germans being the most striking one.

So, though I started out not liking the movie, when looking at it as a parady of films, and not of real people, it is much easier to appreciate.