Machete ( 2010 )

Starring: Danny Trejo, Robert De Niro, Jeff Fahey, Jessica Alba, Michelle Rodriguez, Steven Seagal, Cheech Marin, Don Johnson, & Lindsey Lohan

Directed By Ethan Maniquis & Robert rodriguez

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0985694/




Often we complain that trailers give away the whole plots of upcoming movies, but I don’t expect that to be the case with “Machete.” The film began as a trailer, you see -- or, more technically, a spoof trailer sandwiched between the larger parts of the 2007 portmanteau movie “Grindhouse.”

That quite funny clip ran about two-and-a-half minutes and featured Danny Trejo, the tough-guy actor with the face like a walnut shell, as a former Mexican law enforcement officer hired to assassinate a Texas politician.  Double-crossed by the folks who gave him the job, Machete launches an all-out assault on his betrayers, abetted by a shotgun-wielding priest (Cheech Marin) and an army of illegal immigrant day laborers.  (Yes, you really can tell all that from the original trailer; maybe it did reveal too much....)

Now Robert Rodriguez, who directed that spoof trailer, and Ethan Maniquis, his frequent editor, have combined to turn the original brief joke into a feature film, fleshing out the story, adding characters and subplots, and turning what was, in effect, a barroom jest into a full-fledged narrative.

In a sense, its origin makes a special case of “Machete” -- you can’t criticize a movie for being thin on plot or cartoonish or ridiculous, after all, when it has its seed in a parody of an ad for an over-the-top exploitation picture.  That said, Rodriguez has so often been so slipshod in deploying his talents and indulging his sometimes sophomoric tastes that it’s possible, in theory at least, that he might swing and miss at even this slowly lobbed pitch and turn it into a tiresome one-note joke like “Snakes on a Plane” -- with blades instead of fangs.

Happily, Rodriguez has mostly avoided his own worst tendencies.  You wouldn’t call “Machete” a well-made movie -- it’s sloppily crafted, silly, self-satisfied.  But it provides, more or less, everything that the original trailer promised: lurid action, gratuitous nudity, absurd humor and the glaring, taciturn Trejo, who can’t act, exactly, but sure can signify.  This is, in effect, the film that “The Expendables” wishes it were: raw, macho, funny, up-tempo and disposable in the best possible sense.

The full-length “Machete” adds dimensions that the spoof trailer couldn’t contain.  There’s a (fairly muddled) political story about a state senator (Robert De Niro, milking a cheesy Texas drawl with glee) running on an anti-immigration platform and engineering a fake assassination attempt to boost his bona fides.  There are two women of Mexican descent: a taco vendor (Michelle Rodriguez) who serves as a kind of Harriet Tubman for immigrants and an border agent (Jessica Alba) who wants to shut down the other gal’s network.  There’s an uber-villain (Steven Seagal) who runs the Mexican drug trade and has been trying to kill Machete for years.  And there’s a vigilante (Don Johnson) who’s willing to execute anyone to secure Texan sovereignty.

If this sounds like a lot of potentially heavy stuff for an action picture, rest assured that the political satire and commentary merely provide backdrop for flying bullets, swinging blades, spurting arteries, naked babes, and tough-guy one-liners (“Machete don’t text” is tattoo-worthy).  The film takes absolutely wild-eyed delight in viscera, gore and grotesquerie (to wit, one poor fellow’s intestine is used as an escape rope, while another man is quite explicitly crucified).  Not only doesn’t “Machete” have good taste, it has never heard of good taste.

But what “Machete” does have -- and what saves it from itself -- is comic bloodthirst, shameless vulgarity and the determination of Rodriguez and Maniquis to wink at their audience at every moment (anyone who casts Seagal these days is surely engaged in facetiae of a high order).  You can’t always count on Rodriguez to get the balance of lunacy, competence and coherence right.  But here he more or less gives you exactly what you were looking for: 100 or so minutes as bloody, excessive and ridiculous as those initial 150 or so seconds.

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Mr. What?