Machete
September 3, 2010
Rated: R Runtime: 105 min Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
In the 2007 movie Grindhouse (Planet Terror), Robert Rodriguez added a fake trailer for a nonexistent movie called Machete. The concept is pretty simple: What if the guy who plays The Heavy, the scarred henchman of the main villain in a zillion action movies, was actually the hero?
Danny Trejo was in the Robert Rodriguez-produced Predators earlier this summer, now he’s back, and Machete is a real film.
He’s called Machete because, well, he carries a machete. He’s a former Mexican Federale, double-crossed and left for dead. He’s fled to Texas, working as a day laborer, and there he’s approached by a rich businessman to kill a U.S. senator for money.
Machete!
This is a very violent but very tongue-in-cheek movie. He finds himself in one escalating violent situation after another, and the bad guys are all Very Bad, so, he can kill them with whatever creative methods come to hand. Because sometimes he doesn’t have his machete with him. Sometimes he just has a weedwhacker. But calling the movie WEEDWHACKER wouldn’t have the same ring to it.
Machete is a man of few words. He makes laconic seem chatty. “You’re the second beautiful woman to give me a ride today,” he tells immigration agent Sartana (Jessica Alba) with bemusement, in perhaps his longest speech in the film. He’s a fighter, not a lover. Actually, he’s a lover too, and women are drawn to him like moths to a flame. Michelle Rodriguez, Lindsey Lohan, and a bevy of beauties are unable to resist the charms of Machete.
Cheech Marin plays a priest who may think that various Thou Shalt Nots are really more guidelines than firm rules.
And bad guys include Robert De Niro, Jeff Fahey, Steven Seagal, Don Johnson, and horror director Tom Savini.
This is another homage to 1970s-or-so exploitation movies that Tarantino (who produced this film) and Rodriguez love. It doesn’t try as hard as Grindhouse (Deathproof/Planet Terror) to recreate the look and feel of those films though. Similar to the way the 2008 Tarantino-produced Hellride tried to be the ultimate motorcycle movie, or the 2009 movie Black Dynamite spoofed 1970s blaxsploitation movies, this is the ultimate revenge flick. But it never takes itself very seriously, and the violence, though grisly, is cartoonish.
Machete isn’t really a man of the 21st century (”Machete don’t text!” he growls), but don’t get the wrong idea: Machete can hack a computer password with the best of them, in a scene that spoofs any number of more-ridiculous movies.
I’m giving this 5 stars, because it manages exactly what it sets out to do: Be a good, violent action movie while simultaneously being a send-up of violent action movies. And Danny Trejo is obviously having a ball. If you can, try to see this in a theater with a good crowd who are in on the joke, because the audience reactions to certain scenes can be priceless.
Popularity: 46% [?]
Seen it? How many stars do you give it?
(7 votes, average: 4.43 out of 5)
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Official site for the film: http://www.vivamachete.com.
A plethora of trailers: Original faux trailer from GRINDHOUSE: YouTube. Robert Rodriguez’s Cinco de Mayo joke: YouTube. Official trailer: YouTube. There was a Red-Band trailer, but it seems to have been removed from the Interwebs!
And here’s some photos from the Fete Machete, a sneak preview party at the Plaza Theater in Atlanta.
These are minor spoilers, but, as a scavenger hunt for sharp-eyed moviegoers (sharper-eyed than mine, anyway): Per the IMDB, Rose McGowan has a cameo in Machete as Cherry Darling, her character from Grindhouse/Planet Terror. Wikipedia however makes a different claim: That she’s in the movie as Ginger, a character hired by the Jeff Fahey character. I didn’t spot this, and I was kind of looking for her. I suspect both of these factoids may be inaccurate, as Robert Rodriguez and Rose McGowan split up in late 2009, and, unless they parted on amiable terms, this cameo may have been cut. But certainly something to watch for.
Also, apparently at one time there was going to be a fake trailer in Machete, along the lines of the ones in Grindhouse. It was to be called Agent Orange, directed by Tarantino, with Tim Roth as the title role. It apparently didn’t survive to the theatrical release. Maybe, if it was really filmed, it’ll make it to the DVD.