Machete: Not Sharp Enough
Sorry, kid. I’m fresh out Rolex.
Rating: 4 out of 10
Every genre has rules and that includes homage, which is basically a genre impersonating other genres. Doing a send up of past movie styles, you must decide right off the bat whether you are going to run faithful to the original content or celebrate it with a sense of humor or possible mockery. Trying to do all of those can lead to a sense of confusion for the piece and leaves the audience wondering whether they should be taking anything they see seriously. With such an overwhelmingly positive lead-in, you might already get the gist of my opinion on this 70′s-style mexican-sploitation flick (Is “brownsploitation” a word? Guess it is now.) For more detailed reasons, keep on reading.
Machete tells the terrible tale of a former Mexican federale who witnesses his wife get decapitated by a notorious drug lord. Surviving the fire he was supposed to have died in, Machete makes his way across the border to try and make a new life for himself, but he soon finds the past hardly ever stays in the past. Colliding with the heated battle over illegal immigration, he finds himself a pawn in a much larger game, but one he is determined to finish.
My biggest issue with this flick is the one thing in the description that does not belong, actual politics. While some movies are built and bred for commenting on the real world outside the theater, exploitation movies parody that world instead of making serious commentary. Machete dives way too deep into the political firestorm of immigration policies and finds itself trying to make a real statement, while still keeping the boobs, blood and blades. That kind of balancing act throws the entire experience for a loop and derails the silliness that should’ve been running through every moment of the script. The opening five minutes were great and emblematic of what the following ninety should have been, but for some reason a decision was made to attempt a meaningful plotline. Wrong move.
Also, this movie was basically an experiment in growing something for a very specific fan base. The original trailer for Machete was created as a fake movie trailer in the Tarantino/Rodriguez double feature, Grindhouse. The context and application were perfect back then, but splitting it out and creating a new feature film out of it might have been one step too far. Parts of it felt like Machete director, Robert Rodriguez, just had so much fun making the trailer that he didn’t want to let it die there. While I fully support people working on stories and projects they have a passion for, sometimes there needs to be more reason to do it than, “It was fun.”
For those who read even deeper between the lines in the Hollywood lexicon, this film also was supposed to represent the inevitable and well deserved top billing of Danny Trejo, a character actor who so many know by face, but so few know by name. I fully stand behind finding a leading role that Trejo could finally take to the screen and get some hard earned credit for, but Machete felt thin and hollow in comparison to his earlier cameo and side appearances. I hope Trejo gets another shot at taking the starring role, but if you are looking for that great stepping out into the spotlight moment, it’s not here (try The Visitor instead, where the amazing Richard Jenkins got his starring shot and received incredible amounts of nominations, all well deserved.)
Surrounding Trejo was a handful of random names, each meaning to drive the audience further into a novelty frenzy, but as the scenes wore on, very few really made any real impression. Jeff Fahey (who many know as the virtually insane Lawnmower Man), Steven Seagal (from numerous martial arts actions movies bearing three word titles, Marked for Death, Above the Law, Hard to Kill, etc…), and Jessica Alba (if you don’t know her, well, you probably don’t own a computer), they all make an effort to keep the tongue-in-cheek mentality alive, but when Alba makes her big “the border crossed us!” speech in the movie, the rising tide crests and breaks against the shores of overdone filmmaking. The worst of the bunch was Lindsay Lohan, which has now become a perfect example of what happens when your off-screen infamy distracts from your on-screen fame. Her entire role was a joke commenting on her real life, which only made it worse. If she wants to get back into the good graces of the movie watching audience, she needs to take something with a bit more meat to it and prove she’s more than just a faded child star. The only person who actually got some good screen time out of this was Hollywood rebel chic, Michelle Rodriguez. She really did embody a revolutionary leader persona and it made me wish Steven Soderbergh had found a place for her in his biographical epic, Che, about the Cuban guerrilla revolutionary leader. While she might have had some rocky times in the shiny city of Hollywood, Rodriguez is beginning to remind people what she is capable of (which if you are one of those in need of reminding, please go watch Girlfight.) Maybe she could teach Lohan a thing or two?
The End of the Page Recommendation: Machete cut itself down with too much politics and not enough limb-chopping. For a better example of exploitation homage, check out Black Dynamite instead.
DandyID
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