Machete (2010)
Starring Danny Trejo, Jessica Alba, Steven Seagal, Michelle Rodriguez, Jeff Fahey, Don Johnson, Lindsay Lohan, Daryl Sabara, and Robert DeNiro
Directed by Ethan Maniquis and Robert Rodriguez
Having never seen the Quentin Tarantino-Robert Rodriguez flick
Grindhouse which apparently contained a fake trailer that spawned Ethan Maniquis and Robert Rodriguez'
Machete, there weren't really any expectations going into this movie. In the end, the story probably just should have been content with the kooky fake trailer and left it at that because this homage to the B-movies of the 1970s overstays its welcome by about 45 minutes of its hour-and-forty-five-minute runtime.
The broad story is ridiculously simple. The titular character, an illegal Mexican immigrant (played by Danny Trejo), is hired by a shady guy (
Lost's Jeff Fahey) to assassinate a Texas senator (Robert DeNiro) who happens to pride himself on his creatively unjust methods on keeping illegal immigrants out of the country. Little does Machete know that he's simply being set up in order to make the senator (who is experiencing a sharp downtown in the polls) become more sympathetic to the voting public. Somewhere along the line, Machete discovers this double-crossing and eventually meets up with a sexy US immigration officer (Jessica Alba) with whom he teams up with to defeat his enemies.
What works here is the violence...and there's certainly plenty of it. Excessive to the extreme, it's in these moments of massive bloodletting where the humor and fun lie. Taking no prisoners, Machete is a man who'll chop off peoples' heads without pausing for a second, and there's something grotesquely fun about watching ludicrous decapitations and profusely spewing blood. It's when the film decides to bog itself down with dialog and attempts to present a "pro-illegal immigrant" stance where the film falls apart. Yes, yes, I'm a republican, but I didn't hate this film for taking the other side of the issue. I disliked the movie for taking that stance in a silly, unsubstantial way. I'm certainly not turning to a film like
Machete for political advice, but even the final showdown between the Mexicans and the Americans just felt disappointing and unsatisfying after such a lengthy, talky build-up. (There was actually substantial talk about this issue when the film was released and I think most of the Republican bloggers were giving more weight to the issue than it was worth. In the end, the movie presents the whole thing in a tongue in cheek way...although it certainly does paint a caricaturish image of Republican senators.)
The film initially starts out visually grainy, looking like a film that's been run through the projector one too many times. It's rather unfortunate that
Machete abandons that look after the first scene because it would have been a little more optically appealing. That older look screamed "B-movie" and it would've made the horrible acting by the likes of Lindsay Lohan and Jessica Alba seem more like it was horrible for a reason as opposed to the fact that the two women just can't act.
The RyMickey Rating: C-
