September is the time when the blandest and least essential movies are trotted out to pasture and humanely destroyed by audience disinterest. It’s a time when the studios take the films that aren’t bad enough to be released directly to DVD but not good enough to be released any other time of the year and indiscriminately dump them into theaters. It’s an entertainment dead zone where creative bankruptcy and “Resident Evil” sequels reign. So it’s a little surprising that a film like “Machete” would be released during this period in fact, it almost functions as a warning. But there’s no need to worry, because “Machete” is nothing like mediocre films that surround it. With that said, however, “Machete” never lives up to the potential of its legendary trailer.
In the amazing opening sequence, we find Machete (Danny Trejo), a rogue Federale charging recklessly into a rescue mission that finds him decapitating an endless array of thugs, rescuing a nude woman with a cell phone concealed in her vagina and betrayed by an unnaturally tanned and bloated Steven Seagal. It’s an incredible bit of filmmaking, mainly because it effortlessly distills everything that’s great and hilarious about ’70s-era B movies.
Unfortunately, this sequence serves as a promise that directors Robert Rodriguez and Ethan Maniquis can’t help but betray, because the film never fully recaptures this moment. Instead “Machete” takes a slightly less frenzied approach when, after a three-year absence, a now disgraced Machete is offered $150,000 to assassinate John McLaughlin (Robert DeNiro, oddly), a U.S. Senator with virulent views on illegal immigrants. But during the assassination attempt, Machete is double-crossed and left for dead. Machete somehow manages to survive and vows revenge against the organization that hired him and uncovers a vast right-wing conspiracy involving Mexican drug cartels, murderous Minutemen and plans for a large electrified fence that will seemingly cut off the U.S. from Mexico.
Born out of the fake trailer that ran before the “Planet Terror” segment in “Grindhouse,” “Machete” is an incredible recreation of a vintage B movie if only because, like all B movies, it’s never as great as its original trailer suggested. Nonetheless, “Machete” is still very entertaining and full of classic moments. Most notably the scene where Machete stabs a guy, grabs his intestines, runs through a second story window and then uses the intestines as a makeshift rope to crash through a first floor window, or the revelation that Machete survived a shot to the head only because the bullet bounced off another bullet that was already lodged there.
“Machete” also boasts the most unrestrained, most reckless, Evel Knievel-esque stunt-casting ever committed on film. The fact that DeNiro, Lindsay Lohan, Seagal and Don Johnson actually share screen space deserves some kind of special one-time-only Oscar for “Achievements in the Field of Really Unlikely Shit.”
But “Machete” is never consistent in its joyful mindlessness, and it’s hampered by a convoluted storyline and political viewpoint that is admittedly valid but also handled in a clumsy, ham-fisted way. And Jessica Alba should be permanently exiled to the pages of Maxim and kept away from things that require her to talk or move. Why was her character even necessary to the storyline? Didn’t Michelle (an actual actress) Rodriguez’s character render hers superfluous? Really, why the hell was Alba even in this, and don’t say “to give boners,” because you’re an adult and you’re too old to say boner.
At any rate, “Machete” is definitely worth watching, but be warned that its parts are rarely the sum of its whole.
Rating: W W W 1/2
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