Machete Review

Posted by Trevor Snyder on 09.03.2010

Robert Rodriguez's highly-anticipated grindhouse action film Machete has finally arrived! But does it deliver or fall flat? 411's Trevor Snyder checks in with his full review!

MACHETE (2010)



Directed by: Robert Rodriguez and Ethan Maniquis
Written by: Robert Rodriguez and Alvaro Rodriguez
Starring: Danny Trejo, Robert DeNiro, Jessica Alba, Steven Seagal, Michelle Rodriguez, Jeff Fahey, Cheech Marin, Don Johnson, Shea Whigham, and Lindsay Lohan
Runtime: 105 Minutes
Rated R for strong bloody violence throughout, language, some sexual content and nudity.



Machete is a love letter. Yes, a love letter full of brutal decapitations, naked breasts, sexy federal agents using high-heeled shoes to battle luchadores, and men swinging from windows using other men’s intestines…but a love letter, nonetheless.

In fact, it is actually two love letters. On one hand, it is filmmaker Robert Rodriguez’ love letter to aficionados of trash cinema, that certain breed of film fan who like their movies cheap, vulgar, and just plain crazy. Rodriguez is already a hero to this group, thanks to films like Desperado, From Dusk Till Dawn and Planet Terror. Now, here, he (aided by co-director and long-time editing collaborator Ethan Maniquis) once again gives his own special shout-out to exploitation fans, showing them that even in an era driven by glossy, over-produced studio fare, he’ll always be around to make sure the spirit of renegade cinema doesn’t die. There’s a moment in Machete where the hero stands on the roof of a truck and triumphantly raises his arm, prompting cheers from an army of supporters surrounding him. That might as well be Rodriguez on that truck, surrounded by a legion of movie nerds wearing Russ Meyer and Jack Hill t-shirts.



And then, more significantly, it is also Rodriguez’s love letter to star Danny Trejo. Trejo has long been one of the coolest “oh, it’s that guy” actors around, and a big part of that is due to his collaborations with Rodriguez, which started back in Desperado and have continued throughout almost every Rodriguez film since. Trejo has obviously been one of Rodriguez’s primary muses for some time, and now the director is re-paying him with his own star vehicle. I’m not sure any other director could (or would have wanted to) get a major studio to put out a high-profile release with Trejo in the lead. Perhaps nothing speaks more of Rodriguez’s do-it-yourself-and-forget-the-conventional-rules ethic than this.

And what a star vehicle it is, positing Trejo as the movie bad-ass of the moment. Sylvester Stallone’s The Expendables was supposed to be the testosterone-driven, macho movie of the year. After watching Machete, I believe that Trejo could polish off the entire Expendables crew in the time it takes the ordinary man to make breakfast…and he then take out both The Losers and The A-Team by lunch. Watching this movie, it’s not hard to see the star-power value that Rodriguez clearly recognizes in Trejo. Maybe he’s not the best actor around…but neither are guys like Stallone or Schwarzenegger. For movies like this, what matters is charisma, and how bad-ass they look. Trejo has both of these qualities.

With his craggy looks and icy glare, Trejo oozes the same sort of “I’m gonna F’ you up” aura that made Charles Bronson an action icon. And, like Bronson’s Death Wish films, Machete is smart enough to keep Trejo’s dialogue to a minimum, instead just letting his looks and the action scenes do the talking for him (although at least one of the lines he does have – “Machete don’t text” – is just begging to be one of the year’s most oft-repeated catchphrases).



Even if the rest of the movie didn’t exist (or almost his entire previous filmography, for that matter), Trejo’s status as one of the all-time movie bad-asses would be sealed by Machete’s high-octane opening, one of the most thrilling and insane sequences of the year. For these opening moments, Rodriguez retains the scratched and weathered film print look of the original Machete trailer from Grindhouse, as the titular hero, a virtuous Mexican Federale who prefers blades to bullets, ignores orders and stages a one-man raid on the hideout of infamous drug lord Torrez (an appropriately slimy Steven Seagal, obviously having a ball playing the villain for once). Things don’t turn out so well for Machete here, but what viewers will remember more than the story points is just how flat-out nuts this sequence is, with Trejo laying waste to Torrez’s men in a flurry of severed heads and geysers of blood, not to mention the appearance of a beautiful naked woman with a very clever hiding spot for her cell-phone. If nothing else, you can’t say that Rodriguez doesn’t let you know exactly what kind of movie you’re in for right off the bat.

From there, the movie jumps forward three years, abandoning the visual Grindhouse look but keeping the same sort of demented attitude. Now living as an illegal day laborer in Texas, Machete is hired by a shady businessman named Booth (Jeff Fahey) to assassinate Senator John McLaughlin (Robert DeNiro), an outspoken anti-immigration proponent. Although not thrilled with the idea of being a gun-for-hire, Machete accepts the job, so that he can give his earnings to Luz (Michelle Rodriguez), whose job as a taco-truck lady hides her true position as the leader of “The Network,” an organization dedicated to helping Mexicans cross into America and start a new life.



Unfortunately for Machete, there are two big complications involved with the job. One is that it puts him in the sights of sexy Immigrations Officer Sartana (Jessica Alba), who is dedicated to bringing down The Network. The even bigger problem is that the entire job is actually a set-up, meant to frame Machete as a crazed lone immigrant trying to kill the Senator in order to actually drive his re-election numbers up by making his claims about dangerous Mexicans seem true. Now on the run, Machete must try to convince Sartana of the truth behind the conspiracy, while at the same time unite and rally The Network against those who betrayed him. It’s even harder than it sounds. Besides Booth and McLaughlin, Machete and the Network must also deal with the murderous border vigilante Lt. Von Stillman (Don Johnson, making his film debut according to the movie’s tongue-in-cheek credits) and an experienced bounty hunter named Osiris Ampanpour (Tom Savini). In order to even the odds, Machete enlists the help of his brother (Cheech Marin), whose job as a priest doesn’t stop him kicking righteous ass if necessary.



Alright, I know it sounds like there’s a hell of a lot going on in this movie, but that’s only because there is. Once again in the spirit of the old exploitation movies that inspired it, Rodriguez and his co-writer Alvaro Rodriguez have jam-packed Machete with an over-abundance of characters and sub-plots. The nice thing about this is it allows so many interesting actors to join in on the fun. And to be sure, a big part of what makes Machete work is the simple joy of seeing such a strange and varied collection of stars cutting loose in such an absurd film. Not all of them are home runs – Lindsay Lohan, in particular, somehow seems both underutilized and yet not-quite-deserving of the screen-time she gets as Booth's ne’er-do-well daughter (although her presence is probably worth it for her character introduction alone, which is bound to elicit self-aware giggles from audiences familiar with Lohan’s real-life problems). Then again, I bet nobody was expecting Lindsay Lohan and Robert DeNiro to have a scene together anytime soon. So there is that, I guess.



But, for the most part, the cast all “get it,” and do a good job in the movie. Obviously none of these are award-winning performances, but they’re not really supposed to be. All that matters is that they’re fun. And, yeah, I can tell everyone was having fun. That goes a long way in a movie like this. For instance, I’m not usually a big Jessica Alba fan, but she acclimates herself quite well to the film’s strange balance of somewhat-serious and completely-absurd, especially when she delivers an impassioned speech culminating in “we didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us!”



Meanwhile, Don Johnson and Jeff Fahey both turn up their sleaze levers to admirable levels, but the real stand-out is DeNiro, almost completely redeeming himself for a decade of mostly questionable movies with this, a hilariously exaggerated turn as the racist Senator. When you see an actor like DeNiro in a movie like Machete, you know they’re doing it because they must find this shit as silly and awesome as you do. DeNiro’s performance seems to confirm this, and it was nice to finally really enjoy his screen-presence again for the first time in awhile.



It’s probably worth mentioning, too, how blatantly left-wing political this movie is, seeing as how it presents the film’s anti-immigration villains as cartoonish stereotypes. Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t think anyone is going to take the message of a movie like Machete all that seriously, nor do I think that is the movie’s intention. But, like John Carpenter and George Romero before him, Rodriguez has found a way to merge sly, witty social commentary with more ridiculous genre nonsense. It’s there if you want it. If not, well, hey, there’s hot twin nurses firing Uzi’s. Something for everyone.

But, if this film is the love letter I say it is, then it’s important to remember that love letters are best when kept short and sweet. The longer you go on and on, the more likely it is that you’re just gonna start rambling incoherently. This is true of Machete, too. At 105 minutes, the film really starts to lose steam near the end (particularly when contrasted with the energy of that opening sequence), and could have used about ten minutes trimmed off the final running time. It’s a common problem with this kind of campy movie – what seems funny and exciting at the start of the film starts to wear a little thin as you just keep piling on more and more nonsense. The novelty wears off, and it starts to feel exhausting.

Rodriguez is an old-hat at this sort of B-movie story-telling, but even he can’t avoid this “overdoing it” problem. Certain characters show up for seemingly no reason (a wannabe thug played by Spy Kids’ Daryl Sabara is especially pointless), others never quite pay off (unless I blinked and missed his fate, I’m pretty sure Savini’s character just vanishes from the film). And although I love over-the-top violence as much as the next guy, once you’ve seen one insanely violent action scene after another, it begins to lose some impact.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the film’s big action climax, which is unfortunately kind of underwhelming. By the time it rolls around, the movie’s anarchic spirit isn’t quite as fresh as it felt an hour and half ago. It also doesn’t help that it’s just not really all that captivating of an action set-piece. Oh, sure, there’s a lot going on, but it seems to exist just to give every character one more chance to show up and shoot somebody. The direction feels surprisingly lazy and uninspired during this sequence. This is the moment that should have been the most balls-to-the-wall of the entire movie, but instead it’s just sort of a string of goofy character moments.



Still, though, there are enough great, memorable moments scattered along the ride to make up for the fact that the final destination isn’t all that spectacular. A movie of this kind is never really going to be “perfect,” and it’s arguable that the flaws only add to its charm. I know that’s an almost too-easy cop-out…to suggest that movies like this are “supposed to be bad,” so who really cares. But it is undeniable that the target audience for a movie like this are the sort who will forgive glaring imperfections, as long as there is also enough entertaining mayhem to concentrate on.

So while you can by no means legitimately call Machete “a good movie,” it’s almost exactly what it should be in order to satisfy the kind of fans who would go see something like this in the first place. It comes a lot closer to being the “ultimate B-movie” that The Expendables should have been, and even if it doesn’t turn Danny Trejo into a mega-star, it’s at least further proof that he’s deserving of the cult icon status he has earned. The film’s final moment promises that Machete will return in Machete Kills and Machete Kills Again. Here’s hoping Rodriguez is busy assembling the crazy ensembles for those as we speak.

The 411: While perhaps a little too long, and hampered with a mildly disappointing climax, Robert Rodriguez' Machete should still please most trash-cinema lovers with its impressive mix of over-the-top carnage and off-the-wall ridiculousness. Plus, it's great fun to see perpetual second-stringer Danny Trejo finally elevated to a lead role, where he excels and seems more than capable of hanging with (or surpassing) Hollywood's biggest bad-asses.

Final Score:  8.0   [ Very Good ]