I hope you read the above rating in that slow and gravelly Gob Bluth voice (“Rated R!”) because Machete definitely calls for it. Styled after the so-bad-they’re-good drive-in flicks of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s made by guys with a surplus of guts and a dearth of cash wanting nothing more than to shock and titillate, Machete is the anarchistic, anachronistic progeny of Tarantino and Rodriguez’s Grindhouse (2007) double feature, adapted from Rodriguez’s own fake trailer from that film.
In the original fake trailer, Danny Trejo plays the eponymous role, a lone wolf immigrant hired to assassinate a prominent anti-immigration senator and double-crossed by raspy whisperer Jeff Fahey. The feature sticks to the original idea, using the majority of the fake trailer’s footage and building a movie around it with mixed results. The cast now includes a plethora of respectable (and other) actors including Robert De Niro, Steven Seagal, Don Johnson, Jessica Alba, Lindsay Lohan and Cheech Marin. While some of these faces delightfully ham it up in keeping with the source genre’s trappings (Seagal and De Niro), others stick with the more traditional so-bad-it’s-horrible acting style (Alba, Lohan). But worst of all, classic characters Cheech Marin and Don Johnson are given so little to work with that their characters all but disappear (literally for Johnson, who is nearly unrecognizable behind the aviators and extra pounds).
It’s good to see the instantly recognizable character actor Trejo get a lead role. As an ex-Federale, Machete is a one-man killing machine/ladies man. Despite his moniker, Machete actually gets quite inventive with his weapons, promising buckets of the red stuff that directors Rodriguez and Maniquis inconsistently dish out. It’s this inconsistency that keeps Machete from being the true grindhouse masterpiece it aspires towards. It’s confusing when Machete will show a man’s intestines being used to rappel out a window, but then do nothing with a modified weed-eater with three foot-long blades attached.
Because Machete intentionally aims for a “bad” style, it’s difficult to parse the good bad from the bad bad. And though portions of Machete seem content with actual mediocrity, for the most part, this mexploitation flick is a bloody good piece of drive-in nostalgia.
