Machete – film review

Warning: The following contains mild spoilers.

Machete is a damn good movie.

I mean, I’m not asking anyone to be surprised by this, I’m just saying.  It’s Robert Rodriguez directing a cast that includes Robert De Niro, Stephen Seagal, Cheech Marin, and Danny effin’ Trejo in exactly the kind of over the top brutal action extravaganza that Rodriguez specializes in.

Of course, it’s also a movie based on a trailer that was created before the idea of actually doing the movie appeared to ever have been seriously considered.  For those who missed this whole deal, the trailer in question during the original theatrical release of the Grindhouse movie project, a pair of films by Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez designed to emulate the old seventies grindhouse movie style; low budget action films written by anyone they could pay fifty bucks, full of gory action and little to no actual plot or character development at all.  A precursor, more or less, to the kind of goofy big budget eighties action extravaganzas that The Expendables tried to emulate.

So that’s more or less where we end up with Machete, effectively the third title in the Grindhouse series.  Cheesy, kind of stupid, deliberately low budget, and put together just for laughs?  Well, no.  Or at least, not nearly as much as you’d think.  Yes, in a lot of ways it is just Planet Terror all over again, but then Planet Terror was astonishingly well directed, had excellent cinematography, amazing fight choreography, and was edited with a ridiculous level of precision and care.  It was just dressed up behind this ridiculous facade that belied the real craft of the film you were watching.

See, the Grindhouse project was arguably somewhat of a contradiction, since the intention was to emulate poorly written, poorly directed and really kind of dumb films with tiny budgets and no-name actors, but what we got was a pair of incredibly well crafted movies from intelligent directors of intelligent action films, full to the bilges with ridiculously awesome casting (The moment in Planet Terror where Bruce Willis takes off the mask and you realise who it is?  Nearly exploded in delight).

Machete is more or less the same.  It’s a balls out action movie, full of great casting, brought to you by a director who really knows his stuff.  The tension is built with precision and care, an elaborate set up for a ridiculously epic saga of bloody revenge, that plays out in immensely satisfying ways.  The cheesy grindhouse elements are all present, but really they get kind of downplayed.  The film delivers everything promised in the infamous trailer, but it does so almost as a series of asides.

In fact the need to create the film from the trailer, working backwards to imagine how this character might have gotten into these ridiculous situations (and indeed, how we work in Cheech Marin as a shotgun toting man of God; oh yes) really starts to hamper the film in places.  Cheech is actually a great example; the film has some fun with his character, but it’s clear that he’s only worked in there to satisfy the structural requirement of matching the film to the trailer.  He’s removed from the story as hurriedly as he entered, and any emotional impact he might have made is immediately wiped out by someone making a crappy joke.

All of the best bits of Machete are the bits you weren’t expecting.  Frequently, the scenes set up in the trailer end up paying off in somewhat desultory ways that just feel like a letdown.  We’re hoping for these awesome fist-in-the-air kind of moments, but it all feels flat and hurried.  The director is shoe-horning in the trailer elements and moving on, so that he can get to the good stuff.  Even the legendary “minigun mounted on a motorcycle riding over an exploding bus” scene is just sort of tossed in there.

And yet the film is still astonishingly good, because the aforementioned “good stuff” really does pay off.  The new material offers more than enough violence, drama, and humour to fill several movies.  It’s almost relentless, one balls tighteningly awesome moment after another, and all of it worked into a surprisingly elaborate political interplay between numerous antagonists, each with their own specific angle to pursue.

Sadly, that does bring us to the film’s second big problem.  All of the setup is brilliant, and the procedural action is as tight as they come, but the big finale?  Weak.  Very weak.  Machete leads his army of day labourers into the nutjob militia compound, and then just sort of sits around whilst the big fight goes on.  Sure, there are a lot bullets flying, and there are nurses with uzis and stuff, but it’s hard to really care about any of it, when we’re not even that sure who’s shooting who.  It’s just a lot of fluff that takes away screen time from Danny Trejo being an epic bad-ass, which was supposed to be the point of this movie.  When you’ve named your film after the lead character, it’s really kind of important that you give him something to do at the end of it all.  Instead Machete’s interaction in the climactic battle is a rather unsatisfying fight with Stephen Seagal that tries to be a samurai showdown, and fails miserably.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s all a hell of a lot of fun, but the last ten minutes just feel completely jammed together.  Even the aforementioned fight with Seagal’s drug lord character doesn’t have any apparent reason for being there.  I mean, yes, we’ve been told that the character is in town looking for Machete, but in the last few minutes he just pops up in this compound in the middle of nowhere, without any kind of backup or henchmen, aside from one pouty asian girl, looking for a fight.

My other problem with the less than explosive finale is that it doesn’t just undermine the point of Machete as a ridiculous action movie, relegating the main character to set dressing, but it also undermines the ballsy politics that this ridiculous action movie was covering for.  As a commentary on the immigration debate Machete is an excellent piece of work, not afraid to be incendiary and provocative, and allowing interplay between a lot of different voices, but finishing up with a scene where a secret army of latinos arm up and take to the streets seems like it’s throwing fuel on the wrong fires.

I do find myself wondering if I’m maybe missing the point, and being cautious about something that is essentially a ridiculous fantasy, but it still doesn’t seem in keeping with everything else in the film.  But you know what?  For all of these complaints, I stand by my opening statement; Machete is a damn good movie, and one that you absolutely need to see.  Don’t be fooled; this is a smart, nasty, well written and intelligent action film that manages to be a lot of fun, and have a lot to say.  That’s a lot more than most people are asking for these days, and it’s good to see guys like Rodriguez are still delivering it.