*THE TWO biggest pleasures in life are fucking and killing.* This, stated succinctly and brilliantly, is the world-view of the redoubtable Perdita Durango, quite definitely the most unforgettable noir heroine since (at the very least) Thelma ... Louise. Played with astonishing spunk and assurance by Rosie Perez, Ms.Durango has to be seen to be believed - something of a female Desperado figure, with ten times the wildness, she is an amoral, shameless and spirited gunslinger who re-defines the term 'girl power' with a vengeance right the whole way through Spanish director de la Inglesia's riotously enjoyable Tex-Mex noir.

Based on the book by Barry Gifford, Perdita is a viciously dark and supremely stylish second cousin to David Lynch's Wild at Heart (itself adapted from Gifford's book Sailor and Lula) with lashings upon lashings of sex, murder, blood, voodoo, death, and sweat on the menu, all set against a backdrop of immaculately appropriate cactus Tex-Mex landscapes. In other words, the film's aesthetic cultural reference points are spot-on.

It suffers somewhat, though, from an almost-total lack of heart and a comic-book approach to violence: blazing-hot as the film is, a little more warmth might (perversely) have made it one to treasure. Working in its favour are a twisted sense of humour and a sizzlingly sexy atmosphere that bears favourable comparison with any road-movie this decade, with Perez and Javier Bardem (a Bigas Luna regular) performing more like wild animals than human beings, as they career their carefree way through a straightforward star-crossed-lovers narrative that dutifully has the pair imperilled by the attentions of evil gangsters and, of course, The Law.

Bardem plays a drug-dealing bank robber who also trafficks in corpses, and teams up with his like-minded soul sister for adventures in crime a la Bonnie and Clyde, interspersed with regular bouts of the wildest sex witnessed on a widescreen in recent movie history. They kidnap a couple of well-bred all-American high-school gringos (Harley Cross and Aimee Graham) with the intention of brutally murdering them en route, while Perez loses herself in nightly re-occurring dreams about a jaguar that licks her naked body and sleeps by her side. The pair hop from one side of the Mexican border to the other on a supercharged mission to become the most feared outlaws in the region, which they execute with some considerable success.

But be warned: the violence is truly horrible, the pair are not particularly sympathetic, and only the very twisted could find themselves rooting for them. Nor could the film claim to have an ounce of originality about it: it is basically a condensed restaging of all the century's genre classics, which just happens to be considerably darker and more brutally violent than any of the others. Still, there's always room for this kind of thing and indeed there always will be: I suspect I won't go out of my way to watch it a second time, but let's say I entered the movie still waging the war against sleep, and was bolt-upright within the space of ten minutes.

Definitely not one for the kids, Perdita Durango wears its black heart on its sleeve and doesn't give a fuck if your sensibilities are offended. It lets you have it right between the eyes, leaves a big bloody mess in its wake, and rides off into the Texas sunset laughing maniacally. Although not exactly one of the Nineties' great films, Durango must definitely go down as one of the