Features > Movie Reviews > Machete…

Three years after the tongue-in-cheek trailer rocked Grindhouse audiences (such as they were), Robert Rodriguez’s action-Mexploitation flick arrives on the big screen.

Gratifyingly, the dialogue and even most of the shots from the trailer are in the movie, though there have been a couple of casting changes, and the assassination attempt on a US senator is no longer staged to look like the death of JFK. Perhaps that was too close to the bone even for Rodriguez – not that it would phase Machete (Danny Trejo), who has dismembered and decaptitated a dozen heavies before the opening titles have rolled.

Like Rodriguez’s Planet Zombie, Machete is simultaneously a tribute to and a parody of 70s sleaze cinema, in this case the kind of a redneck vigilante movie that gave us Billy Jack, Walking Tall and Rolling Thunder. The era also gave us Charles Bronson as a gun-toting melon farmer in Mr Majestyk, perhaps the closest antecedent to Trejo’s Machete, an honest Federale who is left for dead by a Mexican drug lord (Steven Seagal).

Three years later, the swarthy, long-haired Machete shows up as an itinerant labourer in Texas. Hired, against his will, to kill a reactionary, racist US Senator (Robert De Niro, no less), Machete finds that he’s been set up by the senator’s own aide – a sophisticated double cross meant to restore the politician’s popularity and force through his anti-immigration agenda.

On the run, Machete is aided by a taco-truck vendor/radical chick, “She” (Michelle Rodiguez), and by Sartana Rivera, an immigration officer who believes his version of events (Jessica Alba).

That’s the story, and a better one than Sylvester Stallone came up with for The Expendables, I must say.

He doesn’t look it, but Trejo is two years Sly’s senior – and by coincidence, he made his onscreen debut back in 1985 in Andrei Konchalovsky’s runaway train movie, uh, Runaway Train. No slouch, he’s appeared in two dozen features over the past two years, but this is his first leading role, and he handles it like a pro. You might not want to see him play Lear, but his acting has subtlety and wit, and if Rodriguez want him to disembowel a bad guy, grab his intestines and run down a hospital corridor prior to jumping out of a window using the entrails as a rope… well, Danny’s your hombre.

Released in the US last summer, shortly after Arizona passed state law enabling police officers to question anyone who looks like they might be illegal, Machete takes a similarly radical underdog stance to blaxploitation parody Black Dynamite. There’s no suggestion Rodriguez doesn’t mean it though: “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us!” proclaims unlikely revolutionary Jessica Alba.

It would be hard to dislike any movie that cast Cheech Marin as a sharp-shooting priest, Lindsay Lohan as a hell-raising – frequently naked – adolescent, and Don Johnson as rightwing nutjob “Von Johnson”.

Machete is bloody good fun, but not so much that it wouldn’t be much improved by a group of friends, a bowl of nachos and sour cream, and a bottle of Tequila.