Starring: Danny Trejo, Robert De Niro, Jessica Alba and Steven Seagal
Distributor: Sony Pictures
Runtime: 106 mins. Reviewed in Nov 2011
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Should you stray into Machete (unlikely, given its title with its implied warning), if you last the first five minutes, then you have enough fortitude to stay for the rest. Others, who like their movies sane and quieter, will have exited. There are decimations, decapitations, slicing, dicing and gouging as Machete goes into action. And, every so often, the plot is interrupted by more of this mayhem until an all-out finale.
This is a Robert Rodriguez film. While he does make some of his movies for children (notably the Spy Kids series), he has a passion for on-screen violence, influenced by his friend, Quentin Tarantino, who would be giving full marks to Machete. There is something schoolboyish (in the bad, immature sense) about Rodriguez and Tarantino in the way they put violence and brutality on screen and then invite us to gloat with them at what they have achieved. It is not all that malicious in itself, it is just as if they are daring each other as to how this time they might outdo the previous episode. They may not have pulled the wings off flies when they were kids, but they probably looked on with a mixture of gleeful horror.
It is not as if Rodriguez can’t tell a story and get you in with some of the characters and plot turns (even when you have seen them before). He is a storyteller with verve, and so he is with Machete. And, for visual effect, he has one of the most lived-in faced actor, the lined (ravined) fearsome, Danny Trejo.
Machete came to life first in one of the fake trailers in the middle of Grindhouse, the Tarantino-Rodriguez collaboration of 2007 that had two features and trailers as if the audience were at a 70s drive-in show, no holds barred (especially in Tarantino’s ugly Death Proof). They had film stock that was grainy and scratched (as are the credits now in Machete). There was a B-Budget look that meant you were not to think ‘highbrow’.
So, Machete, an earnest Federale in Mexico is betrayed to a drug lord by his boss, his family is killed and he almost dies after his machete performance (and that is the first five minutes). Three years later, he is a labourer in the US and is picked up by a wheeler dealer to be an assassin. This part of the plot is very like Shooter and other assassination-conspiracy thrillers. He doesn’t kill. They pursue him. He is rescued by a woman involved in helping Latinos across the border and by an Immigration officer. And, it becomes even more complicated with Machete’s priest brother (who, I’m sure never went near a seminary, or missed out on what he was supposed to learn if he did), the assassin-hirer’s wife and daughter and the senator who was supposed to have been shot.
One of the reasons for that paragraph, besides a bit of plot information, is to be able to list the cast – Rodriguez must have huge powers of persuasion. The drug lord is Steven Seagall, with an accent, but still sword-wielding. The hirer is Jeff Fahey who used to be a tough screen hero. The officer is Jessica Alba who starred in Rodriguez’s Sin City. The migrant helper is Michelle Rodriguez. The priest is Cheech Marin. The hirer’s daughter is Lindsay Lohan (living up to her off-screen reputation – or, rather, notoriety). And, as they say, wait for it: the senator is Robert de Niro.
Actually, the core of the plot is rather topical. De Niro is a xenophobic and madly patriotic politician who wants to preserve the American way of life, so no change. He even shoots wetbacks and has himself filmed doing it. He is a demagogue seeking re-election with speeches about ‘stopping the…’ (well, there are only small boats on the US-Mexican border), but the screenplay lays on the redneck campaigning to make it like the bigotry it is. Audiences who stay to hear De Niro will be amused at the poetic justice of how he gets his in the end. Who says a loco film, despite all its blood and guts, can’t have a message.
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