Pancho Villa, the reel story

“And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself,” actually starring Antonio Banderas, is a new movie from HBO concerning the Mexican revolutionary’s strange-but-true brief alliance with the American motion picture industry. In 1914, Villa, looking for money and press, inked a pact with the Mutual Film Corp. that guaranteed exclusive rights to shoot his corner of the war; for their part, Villa’s troops would attack when the light was good and even do retakes if necessary. The result was a seven-reel epic that mixed documentary battle footage with re-creations of Villa’s early life.

Directed by Bruce Beresford, written by Larry Gelbart and made for $23 million, “Starring Pancho Villa” wears its budget onscreen, in its cast, its locations, its large-scale battle scenes. The movie begins brightly, with good supporting work from Jim Broadbent, Saul Rubinek, Alan Arkin and later Michael McKean; but once the premise is established and the “drama” gets underway, it becomes clear that what follows will be too conventional by half, and less than persuasive.

“The improbability of events depicted in this film is the surest indication that they actually did occur,” reads the opening title card. But fact-based fictions inevitably betray the facts they exist to present -- and “Pancho Villa” fails doubly in that it wants to be a movie about the way the movies corrupt history, while being itself a movie that corrupts history. Beresford’s film, no less than Mutual’s “The Life of General Villa,” caters to the dramatic expectations of its audience: It lies -- not only in its invented episodes and imagined relationships, but also in the stirring background music, the slo-mo violence and the irrelevant sex scenes. We see how the real Villa was prettied for his close-up, but Beresford’s Villa is, after all, Antonio Banderas -- every inch the matinee idol in spite of a proletarian mustache and artificially stained teeth.

As seen here, he is a man of perhaps too many sides -- a fighter, a lover, a joker, a killer, a man of the people, fundamentally alone -- which as presented make him seem more pathologically moody than authentically complicated. Though the core of the film is the relationship of Villa and movie producer Frank Thayer (Eion Bailey), who grows from nepotistic nebbish to war-seasoned stud -- “You become more a man a little, I think, today,” Pancho tells Frank after his baptism by fire -- there is no tension between them other than an occasional contract dispute or Thayer’s unlikely challenges to Villa’s way of making revolution.

Without any real story, the film depends almost entirely on Banderas’ charisma -- not such a bad thing: A bona fide movie star, he makes the small screen bigger just by stepping into it. (Slashing away at the federales, he’s like Aragorn at the Battle of Helm’s Deep.) And it’s nice to hear him act in Spanish again, though one notes sadly that Villa is the film’s only Mexican character of substance; the rest are window dressing and cannon fodder. Whose revolution was it anyway?

*

‘And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself’

Where: HBO

When: 9:30 p.m. Sunday

Production credits: Executive producers, Joshua D. Maurer, Mark Gordon, Larry Gelbart; director, Bruce Beresford; writer, Gelbart.

Rating: The network has rated the film TV-MA (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 17).

Antonio Banderas...Pancho Villa

Eion Bailey...Frank Thayer

Alan Arkin...Sam Drebbin