Eric Roberts has been toiling away on the straight-to-video shelf for far too long, as he proves so well in
La Cucaracha, a sunbaked Western noir set in Santiago, Mexico. He plays a perpetually soused would-be author escaping an imagined past of murder and mayhem, writing letters in his head that he'll never send and pondering the novel he'll never write. Roused from his inebriation by an epigram-spouting American, he's haplessly enlisted to assassinate a killer for a local drug lord (Joaquim de Almeida). Damned if he does and doomed if he doesn't, he miraculously survives and crawls from a shallow grave: "If I didn't have such a good survival instinct I would have killed myself long ago." Crippled but spurred by his newfound raison d'etre--revenge!--he celebrates his self-discovery by munching defiantly on a cockroach. But not the cockroach of the title. That honor goes to Roberts, a scurrying little survivor who scuttles along desert roads in his beat-up wheelchair.
The picture tries too hard to strike a deadpan vein of dark humor and too often lets itself get lost in unnecessary details and side alleys, but the world of adobe buildings and dusty streets is like a film noir by Sergio Leone, full of blood-red sunsets and humid nights. Roberts always strikes the right balance of determination, desperation, and futility, never really winning but, like the cockroach, managing to survive underfoot. --Sean Axmaker