"Machete" Review...Keep Making B-Movies!!

Recently, I was invited to a free screening of "Machete", Robert Rodriguez's newest genre flick that can be best described as Mex-Ploitation. The film started as a fake trailer during the "Grindhouse" trailer and intermission set, and was expanded into a full feature length film. 


The film follows an ex-federale (played by the much deserved Danny Trejo) who is a day-laborer on the Texas-Mexico border. He is asked to kill a Senator who refers to the Mexican immigrants as roaches. He is then double-crossed and the Senator gets the sympathy vote. What happens afterwards is an hour and a half of crazy violence and sex as. Machete becomes a cult leader and leads a small Mexican revolution against the Border Patrol. But for those who can get past gaps in logic, buckets of blood, and Lindsay Lohan's breasts you may come across the smartest film to come out of a major studio all summer. It takes a recent hot-topic and flips it upside down, displaying a cartoonish argument for what it really is, a fucking CARTOON.


It delivers the goods on action and humor, and is absolutely the only politically-minded major release to come out in a long time. Which is funny considering the end of the film's trailer shows Machete jumping over a ball of fire on a motorcycle and firing a mini-gun from the bike's handlebar.



Guys like Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino are masters of these genre flicks, because the sex and violence never carry the viewer too far away from the story they try to tell. All great exploitation and genre flicks manage to provide a smart concept that will draw a viewer in before all the madness of the next hour and a half. Sure, most of what they make is an homage to another film, but it's not the same film. Even movies like "Inception" have their so-called original stories called to question (apparently there is a Randy Quaid movie from the 80's that is pretty similar to "Inception") and even guys like Spielberg and Scorsese will rip-off from older movies. What RR and QT manage to do is make these genre films fresh and new.

Prior to the movie's release, when the early draft of the script leaked out, a reader said it would soon "spark a race riot." If that is true, then the movie hit it's mark. It portrays America as a country full of little Glenn Becks and Tea Partiers, exaggerated of course, but they are real and scary nonetheless. They are as cartoonish as DeNiro in this film (he plays the Senator, doing a George Bush impersonation, but jumping back to a Brooklyn accent in private).


Anyways, if you can get past several beheadings and Cheech Marin with dual shotguns, check out "Machete". Also, check out "Not Quite Hollywood". It's a documentary about the Australian film industry and how they pumped out hundreds of genre flicks in the 70's and 80's. It's got interviews with Tarantino, Dennis Hopper, George Miller and many of directors and actors who starred in these movies. It's cool to see how a lot of the things that were done in these little known flicks went on to inspire Tarantino in a bunch of his movies. It's on Netflix Instant if you get a chance.