Film Review | Machete

It’s just as well that Machete – Robert Rodiguez’s unapologetic Tex-Mexploitation masterpiece – has been delayed to arrive during the holidays. It’s a grimy, sweaty lump of pulpy film: enough to want you to take a shower after you watch it (and rinse your mouth with a healthy dose of undiluted Listerine).

There’s no Christmas cheer or schmaltz here, just a consistent, heavy barrage of guns, broads and bullets. Those who can’t handle this sort of thing shouldn’t even fathom to touch it with a bargepole… but if you are partial to over the top, cartoony violence, laced with a healthy dose of nudity in a package that doesn’t take itself entirely seriously, Machete will go down a treat.

In fact, if the usual heart warming Christmas blockbusters are the equivalent of turkey lunch and pudding, think of this as a stiff nightcap to wash down any family squabbles that might have ensued over those endless holiday meals.

Just so you fully understand the spirit in which it was made: Machete was originally just a fake trailer, a joke thrown in the middle of Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s double-bill feature Grindhouse (2007).

Squeezed in between a number of memorable previews for faux-productions (Werewolf Women of the SS and Hobo with a Shotgun are some of the more memorable ones), it promised the story of a Mexican labourer (Danny Trejo), who is hired by the shady businessman Michael Booth (Jeff Fahey) to assassinate Senator John McLaughlin, who’s trying to get by on anti-immigrant votes (and is eventually played by Robert De Niro in the actual film).

After he discovers he’s been set up, Machete unleashes his true self – he was a Mexican Federale whose family suffered a gruesome fate at the hands of drug lord Rogelio Torrez (Steven Segal) – and goes on a rampage against all who wronged him. His unconventional priest brother (Cheech Marin) is on his side, as well as the Mexican revolutionary masquerading as taco lady (Michelle Rodriguez). But things get complicated when immigration officer (Jessica Alba) begins to tail Machete, and Torrez re-emerges…

Much like Rodriguez’s Once Upon A Time in Mexico, Machete’s plot and characters are ludicrous… the fact that one could call the cast an ‘ensemble’ is almost laughable in and of itself: the word conjures up images of Oscar-nominees jostling for space on some quietly plodding drama: here, Lindsay Lohan and Robert De Niro share screen time, and the star is a moon-crater faced bit-actor usually typecast as ‘that Mexican dude’.

But where ‘Once Upon a Time’ dragged the mess out to form something resembling an epic, Machete revels in its grimy B-movie status, so its easier to forgive its overall narrative sloppiness. Instead, we get to enjoy the film with as much gleeful abandon as Rodriguez and co. appear to be having in making it.

Better still, you get to see lustrous Hollywood stars slumming it in the sweaty Tex-Mex heat: De Niro’s done his fair share of tosh in the latter half of his career, but I don’t recall any of these films being as deliberately, wonderfully trashy as Machete. Michelle Rodriguez is becoming an old hand at Latino badasses, though I think she’s never looked better: donning leather bra and pants and completing the look with an eye patch, she wields guerrilla sex appeal with invigorating ease.

Alba, so used to being the wholesome option (she was even an oasis of near-chastity in Rodriguez’s aptly-titled Sin City) plays the party-pooper for the most part, but her eventual conversion to Machete’s cause is effortlessly entertaining.

And Lohan – as Fahey’s drugged out, attention-seeking internet superstar daughter – essentially plays herself (whether she’s aware of the levels of self-mockery she’s agreeing to is irrelevant, really).

Few things are worse than Hollywood taking itself too seriously. And there’s nothing better than a piece of lovingly crafted pulp trash like Machete to start off the year with… if anything, it’ll give you hope for the future: can all films be this fun, please?