Customer Reviews
Tommy Lee Jones is a great actor but the movie lacks - By: B. Chandler, 17 Mar 2007 
This movie was probably made because the US border patrol was a popular subject at the time of making this movie. However it is too esoteric to make any point. Too morose to make any connection with the audience. Too disjointed of have any continuity of thought. The cinematography may work if one was blood thirsty.
If you want to see Tommy Lee Jones in a good movie try "The Fugitive" (1993). Or if you reallly like campy then try "Volcano" (1997).
It is the journey to the final burial that matters in this object lesson - By: Lawrance M. Bernabo, 10 Jun 2006 
I suspected that "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada" had to be a pretty good story to not only get Tommy Lee Jones to work behind the camera as a director for the first time, but also to get him to once again play a cowboy taking the corpse of his friend home. What this 2006 film has in common with "Lonesome Dove" is not the transportation of a dead friend to his rightful final resting place, but rather the way the act defines both the man & the friendship. The important difference is that this time the character Jones plays takes another living soul along on the journey south.
Jones plays Pete Perkins, who runs a smalll cattle ranch & has hired Melquiades Estrada (Julio Cedillo), an illegal immigrant from Mexico, to work with him. When Melquiades is killed & the local sheriff (Dwight Yoakam) refuses to do anything about it, Pete takes care of matters himself. He finds out that a young Border Patrol agent, Mike Norton (Barry Pepper), killed Melquiades, Pete captures him. Norton had buried Melquiades to hide the crime & then the body was buried a second time. Now Pete makes Norton did up the body of the man he killed, & then they head off on horses to Mexico so that Pete's friend can be returned to his family & buried in the town of Jimenez south of the Border.
Essentiallly, then, you have three burials & a trip as the four key sections of the film. "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada" is not a suspense film, where we wonder if Pete is going to be able to carry off his plans. There are obstacles, but his success is never in doubt. Pete is very much from the worldly school where a man does what a man has to do, & despite what the situation might force him to do we never forget that the corpse is the body of his friend. Pursuing Pete & his captive is problematic since what Norton has done would become public knowledge, & this film is decidedly set in a fairly private world. The punishment Pete has selected is not simply punitive, it is instructive & whether the credit belongs to the director or to writer Guillermo Arriaga ("Amores perros") it must be said this movie ends at the perfect moment on the perfect line.
There are other characters, most notably January Jones as Lou Ann Norton, Melissa Leo as Rachel, & Levon Helm as the Old Man with the Radio, but they are relatively insignificant given what is happening with Jones & Pepper. Flashbacks are used to show both Pete's friendship with Melquiades & to let us know exactly how he ended up getting killed. Neither Pete nor Norton are privy to the other halves of the story, but then their purpose is primarily to alllow us to know how each man came to be in this peculiar situation. This is not a story about revenge, it is a character study & an object lesson. What makes it powerful is the elegance of its simplicity, but the subject matter & the deterioration of the title character's body will not appeal to everyone's sensibilities.
