Film Review: Machete (2010)
Machete (2010)
Director: Robert Rodriguez
Cast: Danny Trejo, Robert De Niro, Steven Seagal, Cheech Marin, Lindsay Lohan, Jessica Alba, Don Johnson
Reviewed by Dustin Hall
“We didn’t cross the border! The border crossed us!”
Machete opens with a bang. The film is choppy, grainy, and filled with saturated colors that sizzle under the Mexican sun. Machete and his partner blaze across the desert on the trail of a kidnapped girl. The video message they receive from the Chief on their strangely sci-fi CB warns them not to try to tackle the kidnappers alone, but in true hero style, they don’t listen. Within two minutes, Machete is cleaving a bloody swath through a base full of bad guys armed only with his namesake. Arms and heads are cleft from their bodies effortlessly. Within five minutes the kidnapped girl, completely nude, is slung over Machete’s shoulder, delightfully perky and playful ass pointed at the sky. But there’s only one problem: Machete was expected, and Steven Seagal is waiting for him. A setup?
As the guitar ramps up, and the titles literally burn themselves across the screen, a who’s who of parody personalities light up your retinas. Longtime supporting tough guy, with a face chiseled from the very rocks of the Occidentals, Danny Trejo finally gets to take center stage, Jessica Alba and Lindsay Lohan offer up the cheesecake, Robert De Niro brings the clout, Cheech Marin promises substance abuse humor, and introducing… Don Johnson. I was prepared for war, an awesome war against my senses and my sanity.
Sadly, that’s about where my fun with the movie going experience ended.
I’ll deliver the rest of this disappointing news with the caveat that I was one of the reviewers who, three years ago, was not blown away by Grindhouse. You’ll find much of the same attempts at humor here, and I have many of the same issues with it. If you loved Grindhouse, take this all with a grain of salt, but also keep in mind that Machete can’t begin to match the grand passion and opulence of Rodriguez’s joint effort with Tarantino. Machete is a spin-off and suffers from all the stigma associated with it.
The tone of Machete is a surprise. The opening sequence is about what I expected, intentionally downplayed technical style, a hearty dose of self-awareness, and gore and sex piled up to ludicrous levels as Rodriguez hoped to create the definitive Mexploitation film. But what follows over the next hour and a half is an action comedy that not only plays dreadfully serious for long bouts of time, but also beats you across with the head with its loaded political message.
Maybe the message bit wouldn’t have bothered me so much if it weren’t a political minefield right now. On a personal note, I agree with the movie in its stance on the policies it lampoons, and I tend to think a movie is better if it has something worth saying. But any attempt at subtext got thrown out the window here. Every five minutes you get someone stopping to monolog, “Why is it that we let Mexicans into our home, but not into our country?” “I just want to give these hard workers something to fill their bellies, something other than hate.” “Do you really hate our kind so much?” I mean, Jesucristo, I’m okay with a Mexican saving the day, and ‘the man’ being the bad guy, and even a little nod here and there to the fact that Mexicans are awesome, but stop bashing me over the head with it. The subtle gags, like the fact that all the evil fat cats eat tacos cooked by Mexicans and rely on their services, are effective enough without the melodramatic dialog, most of it delivered completely straight. It sucked a lot of the fun out of the movie.
Meanwhile, most of the jokes just fall flat. All of the scenes from the old Grindhouse trailer are tossed in there, typically glossed over, but they were expected. But nothing seems to have any real punch to it. There’s very little snappy banter that works, and even most of the situational humor kind of fails. Some of the jokes are really hidden, and won’t be picked up by a lot of people, or are exceptionally dry, and that doesn’t really work with what Machete was trying to be. In the writing process they seemed to forget that in a Mexploitation comedy, the jokes should be way over the top, and the political message should be subtle. I think they were suffering from Mexlexia.
Not to say Machete is totally dry. There are some great laughs in there. I mean, the sourpuss old geezers I was in the theater with seemed to be having a poor time with the movie, but the quartet of drunk college guys in the back row and I shared some mutual belly laughs at the carnage in the hospital, culminating in Machete using someone’s large intestine like the fire hose from Die Hard. The battle of the Alamo, take II, replaces Mexican horses with a cavalry of pimped out cars, rearing back on their hydraulics while their (low) riders shoot from the hip. Tom Savini is unforgettable as the dial-a-hitman, even with his brief screen time.
There are some really great gags in here, but they’re just spread too thin. De Niro does a great George W.-esque politician, totally disguising his New York accent, Don Johnson and Jeff Fahey are some fantastic strong-arm villains. Steven Seagal steals every scene as the Japan obsessed Mexican drug lord. But there’s a billion villains, each with their own dramatic turn, their own tie into the illegal immigration story, their own revenge schemes and ties into some other minor character that is not Machete. It just becomes a big, convoluted mess of drama and common action that fails to live up to the ridiculous premise.
I had to compare this movie to Black Dynamite, another recent lampoon of 70′s B-level action films, and it didn’t compare favorably. Black Dynamite seemed to be more clear and simple in its story telling. It was way more over the top with its humor and its old school ‘don’t let the man get you down’ message only added to the humor, rather than distracting from it. Rodriguez has the luxury of Hollywood clout and experience that the makers of Black Dynamite, and other cheap exploitation spoofs, do not. Its a shame he couldn’t keep up the tempo of the films that came before him… or, well, after him, with Grindhouse considered.
It’s the same problem Grindhouse had, a good idea for a gag that becomes spread too thin over the running time. Planet Terror starts with belly-laughs and died down to joyless drone by the end, like a joke that only finishes thirty minutes after you’ve heard the punchline. The most effective and memorable part of Grindhouse was the selection of trailers spread throughout the movie, Machete’s included. But as Machete has proven here, a joke that worked in a three minute gag real can’t always support a 100-minute film. The zany humor that the old trailer promised is diluted by the need to fill in the remaining 107 minutes with drama, and the inability to find a comfortable level of mixture between action, comedy, and political indignation.
Machete has its moments, but it could have been so much more.
