Review of Machete (2010) by Kenneth L — 09 Feb 2013

Robert Rodriguez is an interesting director to follow, and he did make one of my all-time favorite movies (Sin City), but I do have to confess I was kind of disappointed with this one. It does, I think, have the distinction of being the first movie ever to be based on what had been a fake trailer, so there's that. And it does have some fun moments and characters. Overall, though, the movie doesn't really expand in any very significant way on what was already in the fake trailer, and a lot of gags end up feeling pretty half-baked.

The story, which is told in the same deliberately cheesy grindhouse manner that Rodriguez and his friend Quentin Tarantino have worked in before, follows a man known only as Machete (Danny Trejo), a former Mexican federale turned mercenary. He's hired to assassinate a state senator (Robert De Niro) in Texas, but through a plot twist or two, he ends up going out for revenge against the people who hired him.

This is the first movie ever to star Danny Trejo in the lead role. Trejo has played bad guys pretty frequently before, often in movies for Rodriguez himself, and this movie was created specifically in order to give Trejo a leading role. Trejo brings exactly the sort of scary steeliness to the role that you would expect if you've ever seen him in any other movie. What a messed-up face this guy has. The other actors mostly seem to be in on the joke that they're in a deliberately trashy movie, and ham it up accordingly. The most fun performance, I think, is actually from Steven Seagal, of all people, as a Mexican drug lord. Michelle Rodriguez is also pretty good in her role as a secretly badass Latina guerrilla. Jessica Alba seems unaware of the nature of the film she's in; to me, her performance was probably the dullest and least necessary of the major characters. De Niro and Jeff Fahey (Frank from Lost) clealry seem to be enjoying their goofy villain roles, and Cheech Marin steals every scene he's in as Machete's brother, a priest who owns shotguns. Oh, and Lindsay Lohan is in the movie, but what she seems mostly to bring to the role is just the idea we all have of her as a trashy tramp in real life.

For all the fun actors in the movie, though, the whole exercise seems a bit thin. Like I said, a lot of the moments that are supposed to be funny end up feeling poorly thought-out. Yes, seeing Lindsay Lohan in a nun outfit is an incongruous sight, but then the movie doesn't really do anything with that sight. I guess my biggest problem with the movie is that, if you've seen the trailer which spawned it, there aren't really any surprises left. It all plays out pretty much exactly as you would expect it to. Even the action sequences aren't as imaginative or impressive as you would hope from the director of Desperado and Once Upon a Time in Mexico (both of which, at least in my memory, work much better as action movies). And the commentary on immigration is as subtle as a sledgehammer, and doesn't really elaborate anything beyond its single, oft-repeated point that people who jealously guard the Texas-Mexico border are dicks. The end of the movie promises that "Machete will return in 'Machete Kills' and 'Machete Kills Again.'" While that is a pretty funny and appropriate note to close the movie on, apparently Rodriguez is determined to actually make two more Machete movies. Unless he comes up with something really new and interesting for them, though, I'd say the one Machete movie we have is already enough.