Machete

After he is betrayed by the organisation that hired him, Machete – an ex-Federale - embarks on a bloody rampage of revenge against his former boss.

In 2007, Robert Rodriguez – among others – made a fake trailer to play between the Planet Terror and Death Proof, the Grindhouse double bill written and directed by Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino. That trailer was for a Mexploitation film called Machete. This film is an expansion of the trailer.

Rodriguez originally planned a character called Machete for Danny Trejo in 1993, but apart from a character of the same name in the Spy Kids franchise, this is the first feature length outing for the character… And to be honest, it’s a little disappointing.

No one was expecting an Oscar winning turn here, let’s be clear, but there are several issues with Machete. First of all, there is far too much going on in the plot, and sometimes we are left to wonder why we should care. The film starts well, with Machete being betrayed by his colleagues. He escapes to America to start a new life, but when he is hired to kill a senator (Robert DeNiro) things take a turn for the worse for our anti-hero.

As well as this, there are several sub plots meandering through the film that leave it, as a whole, rather muddled. Add to this some thinly veiled political statements about immigration laws in the US and some very two dimensional right wing characters and Machete suddenly becomes very messy.

The good things about Machete are the guns, gore and girls, but sadly these are few and far between. There are a few classic lines, such as “I don’t have mercy, God does” and “Machete don’t text” delivered completely deadpan and some fancy knife work, but there was too much time between the action sequences and not enough violence for this kind of film. Exploitation films ‘exploit’ their subject matter – in this case Mexican immigrants, guns and girls – but this style of film traditionally had more sex and violence than you could shake a stick at. This was missing in Machete.

On the upside, Danny Trejo is fantastic in his first leading role and plays the strong, silent Machete incredibly well, Lindsay Lohan plays a caricatured version of herself that it is difficult not to laugh at and Jeff Fahey has a lot of fun with evildoer Michael Booth. Sadly Robert DeNiro is underused in his role as Senator McLaughlin and Steven Segal is strangely cast as a Mexican drug lord.

There are a lot of scenes in the film that are direct copies of the original Grindhouse trailer, but perhaps that is where they should have stayed. Overall, Machete is too long, too drawn out and too cleanly produced to be a proper exploitation film – or even an imitation. Your time would be better spent watching the trailer or renting Superfly.