TITLE: Machete
STARRING: Danny Trejo, Steven Seagal, Michelle Rodriguez, Jeff Fahey, Cheech Marin, Lindsay Lohan, Don Johnson, Jessica Alba, Robert De Niro
DIRECTOR: Robert Rodriguez & Ethan Maniquis
STUDIO: Troublemaker Studios/Hyde Park Entertainment/Overnight Productions/TriBeCa Productions
RATED: R
RUN TIME: 105 min
RELEASED: September 3

By Eric Stuckart
Creator, Destroyer

This has certainly been the summer for over-the-top action. Last month we had The Expendables, and now we have Machete, which in my eyes not only outdoes that movie on many different levels, it does it completely being in on the joke, and that’s half of its charm. Originally conceived as a ‘fake’ movie trailer shown as part of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s ode to trashy 1970’s cinema, Grindhouse, it consisted of two feature-length films each directed by one of the directors, with four movie trailers between them.

Despite the so-bad-it’s-good approach, the project had some real talent directing the trailers, three of them having the likes of Rob Zombie (Halloween, The House of 1000 Corpses), Eli Roth (Cabin Fever, the Hostel films) and Edgar Wright (Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, Shaun of the Dead) directing, all making the double feature a great sloppy love letter to the great grindhouse cinema of yesterday. Fans liked the Rodriguez’s Machete ‘trailer’ enough to actually inspire him to stretch it out into a film of its own, with everyone’s favorite Mexican tough guy, Danny Trejo, starring as the lead.

Photo from reelthinker.com.

The reason Machete works as well as it does it mainly due to the simplicity to its main framework, all fleshed out by an all-too real subplot not dissimilar to the fear and panic pushing proposals to US immigration problems towards the south border. However, it’s the film’s ridiculous nature and irreverent sense of humor that keeps everything grounded enough that it doesn’t get bogged down by preachiness or serious talk.

Machete is a former Mexican Federale who, after having everything that meant anything to him taken away, flees to America to escape his past. Working as a day laborer, he gets hired by Michael Benz (Jeff Fahey) to assassinate Texas State Senator McLaughlin (Robert De Niro), a greasy politician with hardline politics on how to solve the immigration problems and more than his fair share of dirty laundry. De Niro plays the prickly, race-baiting asshole role so well that it’s hard to not feel dirty watching him onscreen.

What Machete doesn’t realize is that the entire plot is a setup to make the voters feel for McLaughlin and re-elect him, so that Benz can continue do his drug trafficking into the country. After the job doesn’t go as planned, Machete ends up coming at the mercy of Agent Sartana (Jessica Alba) and Luz (Michelle Rodriguez), two women at opposite ends of the law but with similar morals, all while on the run from Benz’s men and a scene-chewing Steven Seagal, as druglord Torrez.

While the idea of a revenge plot in an action movie is dime a dozen, director Robert Rodriguez knows his way around a scene, and more than ably sets up the action in a way that keeps up the tension and draws laughs, albeit in a more gruesome sense of the word, but that’s what he does best.

Photo from reelthinker.com.

One of the best things about Machete is the fact that Rodriguez played up the actors’ strengths and not their weaknesses. Both Seagal and Trejo aren’t exactly known for their acting chops, so he doesn’t force it with them. And for the most part, the casting was pretty well done. It’s hard not to laugh seeing Lindsay Lohan playing a hard-partying socialite, hardly a stretch. And Don Johnson’s role as the leader an anti-immigration vigilante group is scarily realistic.

But most people out to see this movie are going to for the action and the violence, and it delivers. Without spoiling any surprises, the things that Machete does with his blades are by far some of the most creative I’ve seen in a long time, particularly a certain scene that takes place in a hospital. And while the film was shot to look cheesy at points, they did a great job with much of the gore, which didn’t look nearly as computer aided as some of the bloodier scenes in the aforementioned Expendables. Limbs fly around, blood splatters everywhere, and the climactic ending is both gloriously ultraviolent and laugh-inducingly stereotypical, and that’s the whole point, isn’t it?

While some people may make a big deal about the politics surrounding the film—to put it bluntly, Machete makes a pretty obvious statement about where it stands on the political scale—but to base a film with so many ties to exploitation cinema on that alone would be very ignorant, as Machete is about the spectacle, first and foremost, not the politics. While yes, there are some ideas behind the message of the film that can be completely interpreted as such, I think it’s the image of Machete flying through the air with a minigun bolted to the handlebars of a chopper that make more of an impression.

Then again, I’ve always loved Rodriguez’s films (not counting his forays into children’s movies), for better or worse, and that’s the measuring stick upon which I compare Machete to.  It’s trashy, ridiculously violent and tacky, but it’s also a ton of fun. And it never forgets that.

RATING: 8/10

Front page photo image from reelthinker.com.