Directed by Robert Rodriguez
Runtime: 105 min.
Spoiled alert: That over-the-top image of Danny Trejo firing a machine-gun-mounted-motorcycle while being propelled by a fireball in the Grindhouse spoof-trailer for Machete never appears in the movie itself. But Machete cheats even more than that. Robert Rodriguez’s spoof-trailer promised fun, but now that the actual movie is here, he gives us idiocy. Machete combines genre spoofery with a presumptuous political message. Putting action-movie fantasy on the same level as the current Mexican border and illegal-immigrant controversy, Machete ruins moviegoers’ fun.
Rodriguez’s betrayal starts with diminishing Danny Trejo. The haggard-faced Mexican-born actor who has vacillated between villain and hero parts for over two decades is finally cast in a mythic lead role: Machete’s fierce, sword-wielding street rep hides his identity as a government agent fighting Mexican drug lords. he’s meant to be a folk hero to Latinos as well as action-geeks, but Rodriguez’s script limits Trejo’s persona. He doesn’t rise above being a thugly, but resolute, ethnic badass— embodying what Morrissey called “Pure Mexican” when recently saluting the avantrock group Café Tecuba on MTV Tr3s.
Problem is, the way Rodriguez stereotypes Trejo is not avant-pop. (“he’s CIA, ICE, FBI all rolled into one mean burrito,” a bad guy says as if racism was wit.) Silly Rodriguez does not respect the ethnographic complexities of a non-white movie hero who fights for his people while also correcting the inequalities of the American system.
In Machete, Rodriguez emulates the ruthless ambivalence of those 1970s blaxploitation movies that introduced black heroes into previously segregated genres. But appeals to contemporary audiences who don’t understand the enthralling paradox turning rebels into conventional heroes. Rodriguez over-simplifies and deracinates blaxploitation tropes Tarantino-style—down using funk music in the background sex scenes. (Machete swinging from a man’s entrails into a windowsill is an idiotic homage to Richard Roundtree in Shaft.) This undervalues his audience’s commitment the revolution of ethnic pop. Rodriguez misses the multi-culti beauty perfected in that memorable August Darnell lyric, “His mother was a Mexican/ His father was a Cherokee/ But he was All-American to me.” Machete simply becomes a violent joke and Trejo, whose unexpectedly funny appearance Delta Farce was so great, isn’t enough of an actor to rise about his regular pay grade. He can’t keep Machete from being trashy.
Neither can Robert De Niro, who spoofs a John McCain-like anti-immigration Senator. But this context isn’t subversive like the theater radical De Niro’s portrayed in the 1970 Hi, Mom!, Brian De Palma’s first great film that brought radical theater to the big screen. Here, De Niro portrays a stereotypical right-wing bigot. With De Palma, De Niro showed how counterculture behavior didn’t require sincerity to be enlightening, but with Rodriguez, De Niro’s conservative villainy is no more than superficial, which is abusive. Rodriguez’s mix of satire and ideology makes the most puerile political comedy since Borat.
When Machete sexes Michelle Rodriguez as a taco-selling revolutionary, Jessica Alba as an ICE agent and Lindsay Lohan as a crook’s daughter, the juvenile routine of his sexual potency negates the political issues. Michelle Rodriguez’s boast, “I sell tacos to workers of the world. It fills their bellies with something besides hate,” must speak for the director. This cliché action film is as gaseous as a cheap taco. All the bloodletting is like ketchup, yet Rodriquez and co-director Ethan Maniquise’s filmmaking provides no relish. The dialogue is trite and the action techniques (quick mutilations and bursts of blood) are between cornball and inept.
Robert Rodriguez takes advantage of fanboy trash taste, which may be the only aesthetic tradition celebrated in contemporary film culture. But it’s still crap taste, and Rodriguez’s political points—arguing in favor of open-borders and illegal immigration— don’t justify such garbage. Machete never raises one’s perceptions or thinking the way Neveldine-Taylor do. The gruesome prologue in which Stevan Seagal kills Machete’s wife and child recalls the underrated (yet brilliant) Jonah Hex, yet this ludicrously exaggerated violence isn’t meant to be felt—just laughed at with fake erudition. If this kind of selfconscious cinema junk is to be enjoyed, it can only be enjoyed by morons.
