What do you get when you combine two beautiful women, a Western movie, Mexico, and a whole bunch of bank robbing? When the two beautiful women are Salma Hayek and Penelope Cruz and the movie is Bandidas, you get a whole lot of fun.

You can ignore the cover of the DVD dressing them in black so they look like some sort of Western bondage chics. This is your classic Western buddy movie, except the two leads are women instead of men. They fight over the guy (Quentin, played by Steve Zahn), rob banks, fight each other, rob some more banks, kill some bad guys, and in the meantime stop a nefarious plot to steal the people's land and build a railway.

The bad guys are your usual collection of miscreants and inbred wonders led by Dwight Yoakam in a black wig and a great sneer. His Tyler Jackson will be remembered as a great scenery-chewing villain a la Alan Rickman's Sheriff of Nottingham in the annals of film history.

Now I'm getting ahead of myself here a bit, so I'll back up and fill you in on the story. It seems to be set sometime in the 19th century when the railways are still expanding across North America. An American business tycoon is making a bid to run his railroad across a good chunk of Mexico. In order to do that he needs to buy up the land owned by a bunch of small farmers.

The mortgages are all owned by a Mexican Bank owned by Sara's (Hayek) daddy. The tycoon sends his henchman, Jackson, down to execute an unfriendly takeover of the bank so he can take possession of the mortgages and foreclose on them. At first they just buy out the bank and raise the interest on the mortgages to loan shark rates until all the poor farmers renege on their payments. This leads to a calling-in of loans with great finality. A bullet and a house fire usually ensure there won't be any arguments further down the road about questionable business practices.

Maria (Cruz) is the daughter of one of those farmers who gets run off his land. She swears vengeance on the bank that killed her father and heads into town to rob it. Meanwhile, back at the hacienda, Sara comes home to find her daddy dead and Jackson standing over his dead body. "He died of a heart attack" just doesn't cut it for her. When she goes after Jackson with a knife, he decides she needs to rest up in her room and sends two guards with her.

Naturally she escapes on her trusty horse and flees into the desert. As she sits there crying for her father, she steals herself and decides to go and rob his bank, but whom should she run into while robbing it but Penelope. They are just about to get into a big argument about who gets to rob the bank when the manager warns them of impending trouble on the way: Jackson and company.

After their initial disagreement (about what to do with the money) almost destroys the church they are hiding in, the priest leads them to where he had hidden the survivors of the land thieves. Sara undergoes an epiphany and decides they must help the people by robbing banks and giving the money over to them so they can get their land back.