Review: Machete

Grade: A-

The man known only as Machete was once an honorable federale agent in Mexico. When a drug kingpin, Torrez, kills Machete’s wife and child and attempts to kill Machete himself, he flees across the border to America to hide. Three years later, Machete is working as a day laborer in a border town in Texas. One day, a mysterious man, Booth, shows up and gives Machete $150,000 dollars to assassinate a Texas senator, Senator McLaughlin, which is a job he doesn’t want. When Machete shows up to do the job, he is double crossed and shot and framed for attempting to kill the senator. Machete then goes on a rampage to hunt down the people who double crossed him and find out who is behind it all and in the process, begins a Mexican revolution at the border.

Machete is just plain bloody, over the top, ridiculous fun. As many of you may remember, back in 2007 directors Robert Rodriguez (Desperado, Sin City) and Quentin Tarantino (Inglorious Basterds, Reservoir Dogs) made a double feature movie called Grindhouse that was an homage to the exploitation / grindhouse movies of the 70’s, complete with fake trailers for other grindhouse movies, one of those fake trailers was Machete. Well, Rodriguez decided to take his fake trailer and make an actual movie out of it. So this movie is crazy and over-the-top and unrealistic but loaded with violence and fake gore. This movie is just good fun and about the cheesiest movie to come out in a long time, but that just adds to the fun of watching it. The only thing about this movie that I didn’t like was the political message being beat into your head throughout the movie. The bad guy in the movie is the senator who wants to build a wall and kick all the illegal immigrants out of the country. On top of the politics taking a little bit of the fun out of the movie, the political message being spout out is a little messed up in my opinion and I don’t really agree with it, but this isn’t the place to talk about that.

Danny Trejo (Predators, Once Upon a Time in Mexico) plays the titular character, Machete. While Trejo has been in a ton of movies, he’s never really played a leading role. He did a great job leading this movie, there really is no better person to play the role of Machete. Robert de Niro (What Just Happened, Stardust) plays the evil Senator McLaughlin. He did a pretty good job playing a really bad guy for once, did a good job playing the stereotypical Texan. Jessica Alba (Fantastic Four, Sin City) plays Sartana, an immigration officer who decides to side with Machete. Alba did a good job with this movie, I like her acting but she seems to do a lot of bad movies. Steven Segal (Under Seige, Out for Justice) plays Torrez, an evil drug kingpin trying to kill Machete. Segal was entertaining and very Segal-esque that we all remember, he also got pretty fat. The movie also features performances by Michelle Rodriguez, Jeff Fahey, Cheech Marin, Don Johnson, Lindsay Lohan, Daryl Sabara and many other familiar faces from Rodriguez’s other movies.

If you liked Grindhouse, you will absolutely love Machete. It is just so much fun on every level. If you remember the fake trailer for Machete before Grindhouse, you will be very pleased with this movie because every shot that is in that trailer is in the movie at some point. On top of that, they kept the cast in their proper roles from the trailer. If you love cheesy, campy, over the top action type movies, go see Machete.

Great quote: “Machete don’t text.”