You be honest with you, by the time Robert Rodriguez released Machete on the world, I was pretty much over the whole fake Grindhouse craze that he and Tarantino tried to jump start back in 2007. While there was certainly much fun to be had over a range of genre pictures that boosted up the deranged cheesiness to the Nth degree, all the deliberately bad acting and manufactured film degradation had eventually just started to get on my nerves.
One person it obviously didn’t bother was Rodriguez himself, who obviously thought the joke wasn’t over and summarily went and made a feature expansion to his fake Grindhouse trailer anyway. Thus we finally got the Machete movie that the director had been promising/threatening for ages – but while it certainly gains points for being a long overdue showcase for the scowly talents of the legendary Danny Trejo, isn’t the whole thing as irreverent as loudly quoting an outdated catchphrase to cringe inducing effect, or is Machete actually sharper than it looks?
After a mission to rescue a kidnapped girl results in everything he loves being brutally taken from him by weirdo drug lord, Rogelio Torrez, Mexican federal Machete Cortez ends up scrounging for work in Texas as a day labourer, but one day, purely thanks to the wonders of cheesy action movie logic, he finds himself suddenly swept up into the middle of a race war and a deadly conspiracy.
You see, the sinister Michael Booth is a business man and spin doctor to corrupt Texan senator, John McLaughlin, whose entire platform seems to be about the booting out of Mexican immigrants and the erection of an electrified wall along the border (sound familiar?). To put McLaughlin ahead in the polls, he devises a plan where he hires an ordinary, everyday, Mexican day labourer to try and assassinate the senator, but actually just kill them and frame them for a bungled attempt, therefore giving the politician a sympathy vote. However, as the original fake trailer gravely announced “They just fucked with the wrong Mexican”!
Wounded but alive, Machete plots his revenge against Booth and his vast array of easily mutilatable thugs with the aid of Sartana Rivera, an Immigration and Customs Agent, the taco truck owning Luz (aka. Shé – the leader of the immigrant resistance) and his shotgun wielding priest brother.
As the bodies start to mount, it soon become apparent that the conspiracy doesn’t just contain Booth and McLaughlin, but also ropes in drug dealing border vigilante Von Jackson and katana waving uberbastard Torrez himself. Can Machete gather together as many sharp implements and blunt immigrants as he can to take the fight to the kingpins, bigots and killers – all the while seducing Booth’s wife and daughter?
When the spoof trailer for Machete first played at the start of Grindhouse, it was a fucking sensation and even to this day, the quartet of faux promos for a bunch of films that never existed (helmed by Rodriguez, Rob Zombie, Edgar Wright and Eli Roth) are still the aspects of the failed extravaganza that have remained the most memorable, however, it becomes pretty damn apparent after the first fifteen minutes of Machete: the movie, that the director of Desperado and Sin City has probably taken the joke too far. Continuing the thread from Grindhouse that a visionary director deliberately made a piece of goofy, cult trash with an A-list cast, Machete finally puts B-list stalwart Danny Trejo at the top of the cast list over such names as Jessica Alba, Michelle Rodriguez and even Robert frickin’ De Niro – belatedly reuniting with Trejo for the first time since Heat. To be fair, one of the movie few real treasures is seeing him there and it’s genuinely nice to see a 66 year old Mexican actor carry and action movie after decades of sterling character actor work. However, while Trejo is given the odd golden line to rumble (“Machete don’t text.” is a fucking keeper) and has him carve up an endless about of heavies, the actor’s natural charisma is weirdly subdued by his characters squinty persona.
The rest of the cast seem to be hugely amused at being paid to just fuck around (this has to be De Niro’s easiest paycheck in years) but only a few of the really seem to get the joke. Jeff Fahey obviously does as he not only appeared in Rodriguez’s Grindhouse instalment, Planet Terror, but he’s even been in a few of the movies that Machete is jokingly spoofing and other faces such as Shea Whigham, Tom Savini and Don Johnson mug things up nicely. However, I get the worrying sensation that Dracula-haired, paunch lord Steven Seagal has long since lost the ability to tell the difference between laughing with and laughing at as he attempts a Mexican accent as the villain of the piece.
Elsewhere, Alba and Rodriguez do their typical tough-girl thing (Michelle, I mean, not Robert) and Cheech Marin also pops up – although I’m not exactly sure why Lindsey Lohan is here…
However, Machete, as a full length movie, despite ladling on the gruesome action and disconcerting details (one woman stores her mobile phone in her vagina – possibly on vibrate), just isn’t really that fun and Rodriguez’s sweaty efforts to stuff all the big moments from the trailer results in the diffusing of a lot of the laughs. The trailers huge final moment where Machete fixes a mini gun to a motorbike and leaps into the air while firing at a crowd of bad guys drew a huge laugh, however, in the movie it something of a throwaway moment that loses all of its punch. Similarly, a lot of the funny one liners have now gone from ludicrously exaggerated punchlines to just plain, simple dialogue which surely is the opposite of what you’d want to achieve and you find yourself yearning for the Desperado days when Rodriguez was a bit more focused and didn’t spend an entire hour and forty five minutes winking directly at the audience.
There are still great spoof Grindhouse flicks out there with Hobo With A Shotgun, Troma’s Father’s Day and, yes, Planet Terror delivering the right tone of ghastly humor and brutal violence. But when Rodriguez funnels all of his considerable talents into things like this instead of something original, daring and genuinely witty, you worry that he’s maybe treating his directing career a bit too much like a hobby. Sequels are promised in the end credits, but seriously, we’re good.
A long overdue starring role for Trejo unfortunately is rendered oddly inessential thanks to Rodriguez dragging his heels as he simply goes over old ground and puts the grind into Grindhouse.
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