Review of Machete Kills (2013) by Jordon J — 01 Feb 2014

Tired. Machete (Danny Trejo) is back, and he has to save the world from nuclear destruction. I will quote my original review of the first Machete: this works far better as a faux spoof trailer than it does a feature film.

The fake trailer attached to this movie is far more entertaining than the whole movie itself... until it actually shows you everything leading up to the next movie; when it reaches that point, I was just done.

Now I actually liked the first thirty minutes of the original Machete, but that is when the joke just started to get played into the ground. This 'bad-in-a-good-way' concept was fresh for Grindhouse, and has since run it course.

I have since developed a resentment for these movies that spend millions of dollars ($12 million dollars, in this case), to make a movie look like it has no budget... It just seems like tax fraud, doesn't it? The thing about Machete is that it is severely underwritten; they should have just spent more money on the script, as it is not funny, filled with way too many characters and tangents, and is overlong.

This may only be 107 minutes, but it feels like it is three hours. You can't make a good bad movie by being workmanlike, you have to have vision and passion, and at this point in his career, Robert Rodriguez has neither.