If 2009 was the summer of stale, bloated blockbusters, 2010 is shaping up to be the Autumn of Geek Heaven.
Coming on the heels of The Expendables and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is another niche action movie putting a new spin on familiar material: Machete, the Danny Trejo vehicle expanded from its initial conception as a riotous 90-second pseudo-trailer attached to Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s 2007 double-feature Grindhouse.
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Machete
Directed by Robert Rodriguez |
It gets underway in full exploitation throttle with a Mexican Federale called Machete (Trejo) arriving at the site of a raid with his partner. Two minutes of gleefully gratuitous violence and nudity later, Machete has killed what seems like dozens of opponents only to receive an unexpected stabbing à la Never Say Never Again and then, as if on a silver platter, the ultimate revenge motive courtesy of his betrayers.
But Machete is about more than one man’s quest for vengeance. Or, at the very least, it’s about more than one reason for his seeking payback.
With illegal immigration a topic of increasing concern, Senator John McLaughlin (Robert De Niro) – who enjoys running down illegals with live ammunition in the company of paramilitary friends – is determined to win the support of the public and seal the border outright with an electrified fence. Unfortunately for Machete, this involves being framed for McLaughlin’s attempted assassination by the senator’s right-hand man, Michael Booth (Jeff Fahey).
Meanwhile, as a Latina revolutionary-cum-taco-truck-lady named Shé (Michelle Rodriguez) attempts to help Machete through a sort of Underground Railroad of illicit job placements, an investigating immigration officer (Jessica Alba) who knows Machete’s past finds herself torn when the laws she is obliged to uphold seem increasingly at odds with what is just.
Alba’s Officer Sartana Rivera also gets the biggest laugh of the movie when she wakes with a start, having shared a bed with Machete for the night and frantically checks her body for any evidence of coitus.
For good measure, Lindsay Lohan appears as Booth’s lush of an exhibitionist daughter (let’s just say she has a lot in common with Tara Reid’s trophy wife character in The Big Lebowski), Cheech Marin – who appeared opposite Trejo in the Grindhouse trailer – plays Machete’s brother, an obliging and morally versatile priest, and none other than Steaven Seagal himself plays Torrez, the shadowy druglord behind much of the bloodshed.
The mere idea of “Trejo versus Seagal” has been raising geek pulse rates for more than a decade, and now there it is right up on the screen. And the mere fact of it, without even touching on the execution (which is flawless as far as Seagal’s presence and reputation are concerned), is as gratifying and exciting as it was seeing Schwarzenegger, Stallone, and Willis in the same place at the same time in last month’s The Expendables.
It would be difficult to confuse this exuberant exploitation flick with level-headed social commentary – that’s something even Inglourious Basterds had in greater supply – but with rhetoric heating up over Arizona’s immigration laws (when the issue first arose Rodriguez even put together a special Cinco de Mayo Machete trailer that is readily found online), the “Ground Zero mosque” in New York, and politics in general, maybe this is just the sort of jagged, blood-stained mirror we need to hold up and look at our reflections in.