Mad Mike’s Movie Review: Machete
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Though Machete was written to poke at our anti-immigrant hysteria, it’s more about gross, lavish, comical violence than politics. Critics aren’t taking too many swings at Robert Rodriguez’s latest, which features a “ferocious” Danny Trejo as ex-federale “Machete”—and a mostly naked Lindsay Lohan:
- The “fountain-like spurts of blood and the tumbling of body parts” begin immediately, writes Michael O’Sullivan for the Washington Post. But your best bet is to laugh instead of grimace, “assuming you’re able to see humor in such sequences as the one in which Machete disembowels a man and uses his intestines as a rope to rappel down a building.”
- Though it contains the funniest line you’ll hear all year—”Machete don’t text”—Rodriguez will “never be more than a junior varsity Quentin Tarantino,” writes Kyle Smith for the New York Post. “His sense of humor is as blunt as the calluses on Machete’s hard-worked palms.” Trejo, on the other hand, is an “undocumented Clint Eastwood.”
- Michael Phillips actually finds the “bluntly political” aspect of the film the most interesting. But “don’t get me wrong,” he writes for the Chicago Tribune: Rodriguez wastes “no time with sober discussion of US immigration policy, or a serious investigation into the matter of Jessica Alba and why she never seems to get any better as an actress.”
- “As a political statement, Machete is more a hammer than the titular blade,” writes Ian Buckwalter for NPR. But Rodriguez wasn’t tasked with making “a subtle, nuanced film. The exploitation template at work here requires only a wild, fun ride, and by those raw standards, the movie delivers.”
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I cannot wait to see this film. Rappelling with intestines? Awesome!
Danny Trejo was rightly characterized as an under-the-radar Clint Eastwood. He is coolness incarnate.
Lindsay Lohan is in this movie? Did she get work release from jail?
She did it before sentencing. You might recall that, when sentencing was near, she claimed to need to make a trip to Texas for post-production work on a movie. Machete is the movie she was talking about.
@Mad Mike,
I remember when the trailer (which was all there was) for this that played ahead of the two Grindhouse films. There are several fictional trailers that ran for non existent drive-in exploitation films that never existed by Tarantino and Rodriguez (these trailers are almost better than the features themselves) but this one, “Machete” got a huge response from an audience that was mostly White, that I watched it while I was in LA for week. The crowd cheered mightily for the line “They Fucked with The Wrong Mexican.” Interestingly, this was during a strange lull in the immigration rancor, before it again became a universal wedge issue as it does here in the US every few years.
Rodriguez and Taratino are not versions of each other, and critics show their shallow familiarity with their work when they readily invoke them together in reviews like Kyle Smith of the New York Post did in his. All you have to do is look at their fist films as directors, and their last three. An exhibitionist’s fascination with violence may in fact be all they have in common, their reputed close friendship not withstanding.
The funny thing about violent action pictures is like Machete is, -they tell you more about a country’s state of mind than most “serious” pictures do, because they are evidence that emanates from a reflection of a society’s phobias and desires.
To take an example from decades past, The first ‘Rambo’ picture thrilled audiences, sold well and was an appreciably great motion picture that told us more than we wanted to know about the plight of Vietnam veterans wandering our countrysides and sleeping under our bridges. ‘Rambo’ the motion picture asked a frightening question about whether the best of our Armed Forces Specialists could ever return to society after being psychologically rewired to massacre the enemy.
The sequels that followed the first ‘Rambo’ tell us even more about ourselves: i.e. -we didn’t like what the first movie had to tell us about how we’d treated our veterans. In the following pictures, there was no monologue about Rambo being tortured abroad and then spat on at home when getting off the plane, there was no mention of unemployment in Rambos II, III, and IV.
It’s interesting that critics are judging this action/exploitation picture on its light treatment of the immigration issue, because I can’t name another movie in theatres right now that even brings the issue up.
-SJ
My jaw clenched when I read Smith’s dismissal of Rodriguez as a JV Tarantino. R and T are friends, but they have distinct styles. And R gets a lot of respect from me for the “ten-minute film school” extras he puts on his DVDs. His approach of “fast, cheap and in control” – essentially that studios will let a filmmaker control projects if he or she delivers reasonably budgeted movies on time – is something a lot more directors should adopt. There’s almost never any need for a $100-million-plus budget.
@Stimpson,
and you know, they haven’t helped each other (Tarantino & Rodriguez) out in that regard to an extent, they often spoke of themselves in interchangeable terms early on, but the critics however should be more perceptive than to just buy into it.
‘Inglourious Basterds’ and ‘Sin City’ couldn’t be more different, even with Tarantino directing a sequence IN ‘Sin City.’ As far as their production MOs, they are both notorious devotees of Woody Allen and Clint Eastwood’s approach of agreeing to a budget, sticking to it and coming in on time and under price: It’s always made sense to me. I made a 2-hour feature in New York City for 15 thousand. Didn’t have to get one single film permit or bribe one single cop.
-SJ
Thanks for those observations Sandy. Makes the whole thing even more interesting. Thanks.
@ SJ Based on your comment, I recommend a book “The Monster Show”
http://www.amazon.com/gp/search?index=books&linkCode=qs&keywords=0859652114
The writer goes into detail about the same info as your comment, SJ. How the fears of the nation are reflected in the current monster/horror movie. From the atom bomb fears of the 1950’s to the AIDS disease fears in the 1980’s and 90’s sparking the rise of the Ann Rice novels and vampire romanticism.
@Krell,
-you know you’re the second person to bring that book up to me this week? I’m buying it. Thanks.