A leading role at last, and playing alongside De Niro, Michelle Rodriguez and Jessica Alba, and yet Danny Trejo still can't muster a smile.
Directors: Ethan Maniquis, Robert Rodriguez
Writers: Robert Rodriguez, Álvaro Rodríguez
Stars: Danny Trejo, Michelle Rodriguez, Jessica Alba and Robert De Niro
The ludicrously lethal mercenary Machete Cortez (Danny Trejo) is hired by a group of unsavoury Americans headed by local millionaire Michael Booth (Jeff Fahey) to kill the extreme-right Senator McLaughlin (Robert De Niro) at a rally ahead of the state elections, but when the day of the rally comes, Machete himself is shot at and narrowly escapes death at the hands of his duplicitous employers who were using the assassination attempt to boost the senator’s poll ratings. With the help of a trio of seductive sidekicks: immigration officer Sartana (Jessica Alba), underground resistance leader Luz (Michelle Rodriguez) and Booth’s own daughter, April (Lindsay Lohan), Machete wages a bloody war against the men who tried to kill him.
Machete is definitely the type of film that will polarise viewers - I adored it. Chris Cooper (American Beauty, The Town, Bourne Identity and Supremacy) reportedly turned down a role after reading the script, calling it ‘the most absurd thing I’ve ever read’ – Chris did not adore it. He was not wrong either; the film is completely absurd, totally overacted and excessively bloody, but it is absolutely brilliant for that. If you liked the Grindhouse films, which host the three-minute spoof trailer ‘Machete’ from which the film originates, you will love Robert Rodriguez’s finished article.
Although it is unapologetically gory, the countless stabbings, decapitations, gunshot splatterings and flying limbs are all so deliberately over the top that they become perversely comedic and fit in seamlessly with the film’s self-referential B-movie feel.
Many of the film’s scenes seem to be lifted from the Grindhouse trailer, although crucially the film itself is bolstered by Hollywood heavyweights De Niro, Alba, Rodriguez, Lohan and Steven Seagal, with the men playing overblown characters while the women play more straight (in the realms of this film) femme fatale roles. However this film was literally made for Danny Trejo, a man whose face has more lines than a zebra wearing Adidas. It doesn’t require him to act much, just to go on an extended killing spree and sleep with the impossibly attractive female cast (girls dig excessive gore); the lines he does have he growls disdainfully: “Machete don’t text” he snarls in one merch friendly one-liner. Regrettably, Machete don’t moisturise either.
Lindsay Lohan is also not at all bad as April, a role in which she plays a junkie who spends half the film naked – perhaps everything you’ve read about her in the tabloids is just preparation for this role?
Despite all the reasons not to take this film seriously, Machete actually provides a socio-political commentary about racism and the role of Hispanic immigrants in the South. I’d also be amiss not to mention that De Niro’s Senator McLaughlin is something akin to a Tea Party candidate on steroids. However these are merely footnotes to what is otherwise a wonderfully ridiculous bloodbath.
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