From its first frame Machete assaults your eyeballs with a yellow tinted landscape twinged with a digital glossiness. It is very unmistakably a Robert Rodriguez film. I’ve railed against color filters before. In a film like Traffic, I found it to be an unnecessary artistic flourish for such a street level, real world story. I’ve decried Michael Mann’s use of digital video as being inappropriate for period work in Public Enemy. In this film, I didn’t mind either. Machete is a ridiculous live action cartoon that in no way resembles reality, and the flashy visual style fits this story like a glove. The title character is a Mexican Federale turned illegal day laborer after his family is brutally murdered by a powerful drug lord. Once in the United States he is forced into performing a botched assassination attempt of a strongly anti-immigration senator by this very same senator’s Machiavellian aid. By the end of the film all of the bad guys are revealed to have been linked together, all of the hot chicks end up on Machete’s side, and everything gets hashed out in a series of over the top violent action sequences. Machete is an exploitation film plain and simple. Check all good taste and delicate sensibilities at the door. There is a film going audience out there that loves stuff like this pretty universally. Take ridiculous violence, add some cheesy nostalgia, blend with boobs and a hard rock soundtrack and whatever you come up with is bound to be palatable to them. For those people, Machete will prove to be no exception and they’ll have a great time in the theater. For me, the exploitation genre, especially this new wave of exploitation homage that has developed over the last few years, is far more hit or miss. I’ve seen a couple I really connected with, a bunch that I don’t have time to think about ever again, and a few like Machete that sit somewhere in the middle.
The way that the violence is presented works out well. There are huge blood splatters every time someone is shot, physics and reality are completely out the window at all times, and there are no tonally confusing moments that ask us to take the action seriously after treating it like an over the top gag for the majority of the film. Kick-Ass lost points with me due to it’s confused take on it’s own action sequences, and Rodriguez manages to avoids similar problems here. In addition, there are several moments that are so over the top that they need to be savored and appreciated as truly great exploitation faire. When a nude double agent takes a hidden cell phone out of her vagina (complete with slimy sound effects) to call her drug lord boss there’s little you can do other than just stand up and cheer. When Danny Trejo guts a goon, rips his intestines out of his stomach, and uses them as a rope to jump out of a window and crash into one a floor below Die Hard style, it might just be time to start lining up the Oscars. Machete has emotional flashbacks to brutal beheadings, he falls into bed with an endless series of beautiful women (despite being one of the three ugliest men on the planet), and he does a lot of his killing with gardening and construction tools. That last bit (the central conceit of Rodriguez’s original Machete trailer from Grindhouse I suppose), that a Mexican day laborer assassin does his killing with gardening tools, is actually a really clever and effective bit of parody as far as I’m concerned. There are definitely things here to like.
So now that we’ve got that bit of business out of the way. Now that I’ve made clear that there is a lot of effective entertainment hid away in this film, it’s time to get to the things that I want to bitch about. I am still of the opinion that the more a parody film winks at you, the less effective it is. Old B movies weren’t trying to reference or spoof anything. They were just trying to be awesome. When Machete easily beds down a woman that should be completely out of his league, it should be a hilarious farce, but when cheesy porno music starts to play every time it happens, the gag becomes too much. It’s the film equivalent of explaining a joke. El Mariachi and Desperado were fine exploitation films. A lot of the reason they worked is that despite the fact that they contained simple, archetypical revenge plots, and astoundingly over the top conceits like guitar cases full of guns, they were presented with a straight face. The drama was kind of ridiculous, but it was earnest. It’s earnestness that falls on its face that is funny. Not somebody presenting you with something that is purposely bad and then winking at you so that you know they’re not serious. After watching Rodriguez’s modern catalogue of B film throwbacks I’m not sure if he even realizes that his first couple films were just as much exploitation as this and Planet Terror.
A lot of the dialogue in the film was really bad; much of it intentionally, sure, but often it was presented in a way that sucked any intended humor out of the scene entirely. There is a scene at a taco truck where Jessica Alba and Michelle Rodriguez trade cocky, badass repartee. I guess the joke is that they’re both tiny women and it’s not very intimidating to see either of them play hard-boiled. The effectiveness of that joke relies on them being able to pull it off surprisingly convincingly, however. Here they’re not able to and instead of being funny it just comes off as painful to sit through. Neither has the chops to pull off the grit of the words on the page, Alba especially, and they both just come off as looking stupid. Similarly, there are several scenes of wordy dialogue between Machete and Jeff Fahey’s character that are completely unpalatable. If they were playing the interactions straight, legitimately trying their hardest to deliver bad dialogue with emotion, then it probably would have been hysterical. Instead they are very transparently acting mock heroically and the results are unfunny.
Towards the end of the film the plot gets needlessly complex in a really stupid way. Cheech Marin is introduced as Machete’s priest brother and it just so happens that Fahey’s character has been visiting him in confession and talking at length about all of his criminal endeavors. And it also just so happens that Cheech has been taping all of the conversations. Then it also so happens that a couple of other contrived ways to gather generic computer file evidence are conjured up and dealt with in about five minutes. These developments were convenient and bad enough that they could have been played for laughs, but instead it just played to me as easy and lazy. I didn’t understand why they had to go with this “evidence” subplot anyways. Clearly, everyone is going to be killed by the end of this bloodbath of a film. What was the point of burning calories trying to put together some sort of “case” to get the bad guys convicted? This wasn’t that sort of movie.
The other big selling point of this film, other than the violence and exploitation, was the murderer’s row of characters that were featured in spotlight posters trailers during the marketing blitz. There is a laundry list of strange characters that make up the cast list and they are all portrayed by a bevy of name and character actors, but they each hit or miss on in individual basis. The main anchor of the film and the main risk taken in its conception is the casting of Danny Trejo as the title character. Trejo has a long list of credits playing goons and toughs in bit parts, but casting him as a leading man is a concept that I’m sure would make many a studio exec’s heads spin. I think that the gamble paid off. Just taking into account that the character of Machete is so ridiculously conceived it would take an equally ridiculous actor to believably portray him and I can’t imagine anybody else other than Trejo in the role. Tattooed, weathered, pockmarked, and ugly as sin Trejo sits at the center of this film with an authoritative weight. A real-life former criminal turned inmate turned actor, Trejo projects a believability on screen that couldn’t have been matched by any sort of mainstream Hollywood name done up in fake tattoos and practicing an angry scowl. Sure, he’s not an actor that has, as of yet, exhibited an amazing range or versatility; but in this role he’s not at all required to. Bottom line, without Danny Trejo the actor existing I highly doubt that Machete the film would either. My only complaint is that being at such an advanced age, at this point even a superman specimen of masculinity like Trejo is looking too old and slow to pull off many of the action sequences inherent in this film. If Rodriguez could have got this spotlight for him fifteen years ago it’s likely that it would have meant more. Combine Trejo hobbling around in this film with Stallone and company doing similar rickety kneed running in The Expendables and this has really become the summer of over the hill action stars. I don’t deny that there is still some fun left to be had with these faces; but the need for parody and self-aware cheese is becoming more and more necessary in their projects to cover up their handicaps. Where is the new generation of action star to put out earnest, straightforward action stuff? Why can’t charismatic tough guys like Vin Diesel, Jason Statham, or Dwayne Johnson get big budgets and big directors behind them in this day and age in an effort to match the real action movie cornerstones of the 80s? Has this dead horse been thoroughly enough beaten?
Second to Trejo’s casting on the success scale is the casting of a quartet of villains Machete gets put up against. I’ve already mentioned Fahey playing the scheming senator’s aid. He growls all of his lines in a generic villain cadence, has a appropriately evil goatee, and is generally pretty fun to watch in the antagonist role that required the most heavy lifting. At one point he delivers the line “Machete sent me a txt” in such an absurd way that it was probably my favorite moment in the film. The villain that I enjoyed most overall was Steven Seagal’s pudgy, vaguely Asian influenced, Mexican drug lord. He wears kimonos, kills people with a samurai sword, has a harem of Asian concubines, and awkwardly shoots for having a sort of Mexican accent in a way only Seagal can. The problem with Seagal’s starring vehicles was always that he is so naturally unlikable. Just one look at the guy and you can tell that he’s an ego driven prick. Here, where you are asked to root against him and his eccentric personality quirks and weird Asian cultural obsessions are played up to annoy, having Seagal in your film pays off in spades. Newcomer Don Johnson plays the leader of a vigilante border patrol group, and his performance feels so veteran and natural that I would almost swear that I’ve seen him somewhere before. He exudes the slick charm of a cult leader like oil out of his skin and a few minutes of watching him in this film will have you riled up and ready to take it to whitey. Robert De Niro caps off the quartet as the evil, racist senator. I’ve never really bought into the comedy stuff that he’s been trying later in his career, and this film is so exception, but he’s game to go for what his role requires and he’s ultimately able to keep up with everyone else. I did detect a bit of George W Bush in his performance, which was kind of a fun choice
The other side of the casting coin to the generally awesome villains is the pretty lame chicks. Other than a few background women strewn about for eye candy, there are three main female roles in this film, and I was kind of disappointed with all of them. Michelle Rodriguez plays the secret head of a revolutionary, underground-railroad type organization for illegal immigrants. Jessica Alba plays a conflicted ICE agent who initially seems to be a traitor to her people, but eventually is won over enough by Machete’s man-musk that she joins his cause. Lindsey Lohan very appropriately plays the problem child daughter of Fahey’s character. Of the three I would say that Lohan is probably the best actor, and Alba clearly the worst, but the girls don’t really get much of a chance at serious acting here, so too close a dissection of their performances on that level would be besides the point. Let me just say that I was, in general, disappointed. An attempt is made at making Alba’s character sympathetic, but I never cared enough for the character or Alba’s dead eyed acting for it to work. An attempt is made to have Rodriguez’s character be the bad-ass chick archetype that everybody likes to cheer for, but she never gets enough screen time or action sequence spotlight for it to fully pay off. Even Lindsey Lohan gets a strange, out of place, character climax where she inexplicably dons a nun’s habit and starts to kick ass, but it was far from being something that I understood or enjoyed. Machete is a film that was shouldered by its male actors. The writing and acting that made up its female characters dropped the ball. Of course, most people are going to be approaching a critique of what these women do in Machete based on their looks alone, and even there I walked away frustrated. They are all three naturally beautiful women; of that there is no denial. Rodriguez showed up in ridiculous shape, showed it off in tight pants and a bikini top, and just looked crazy good. I find Alba to be one of the real, exceptional beauties working in Hollywood, and while she appears to be getting too skinny for my particular tastes, she’s still got a pretty face like none other. Lohan, of course, hasn’t looked like pure sex in quite a while and is predictably gross in this film. Her casting most of all seemed to be way more about stunt than it was anything that she actually brought to the table. And therein lies my main complaint about the casting of females in this film. Exploitation films require a lot of skin, especially from the ladies. The girls here seemed to all be picked less for the titillation they could bring to the screen and more for the recognition their names could bring to the posters. Recently, Piranha 3D went the route of casting relatively unknown nude models who were more than willing to completely strip down for all of their scenes as its female characters and the results were phenomenal. That is what a real exploitation film would do. Not hire big name actresses and then resort to the sort of digital enhancing and body double trickery that this film uses to try and fool its audience into thinking they’re getting glimpses of nudity from Alba and Lohan’s characters. Bottom line, if you’re not willing to get the boobs out on camera then I don’t think there’s really much cause for you to be signing on to a purposefully exploitive and tasteless film called Machete.
Machete
