Machete is trash. Robert Rodriguez is a director soaked in shoestring guerrilla filmmaking – legend has it his $7,000 debut El Mariachi was funded from his takings as the subject of a clinical trial.
Machete is a grimy throwback starring granite-faced hardman Danny Trejo, who doesn’t so much act as grind his features into a handful of pained rocky expressions. He plays left-for-dead Mexican Federale Machete Cortez, who, as the film’s grindhouse-heavy trailer tells it, has been “Set up, double-crossed and” – bullet noise – “left for dead.” By Steven Seagal, of all people.
A few years later, Machete winds up across the US border, lying low among a humble population of immigrant workers. This Latin backdrop is one of the film’s few features, reversing Hollywood’s typical marginalization of Hispanic characters and culture. To a point, this helps balance the headbutt-subtle story of chopping people up and having sex to a comedy sleaze-bass soundtrack.
Which there’s a lot of, incidentally. As his name suggests, Machete prefers a keen, sturdy blade to bullet-spewing firearms, which means the fight sequences typically involve him pruning henchmen of fingers, legs, and heads like he’s attacking a particularly unruly flesh hedge.
There’s plenty of sharp object improvisation as well, leading to wince-and-laugh action with mirror fragments, kitchen knives, and, at one point, essential gardening tools.
These are the film’s best moments, beyond the heavily mannered ‘Look! We made it look like a bad film from the past!’ stuff or the going-nowhere plot about drug lords and corrupt politicians and anti-Mexican hatred. This Grindhouse Esque movie has exhausted whatever novelty joy there was to be found in schlocky chat and grainy filmstock – Machete would be a slicker, more watchable film without it. The fact that its trash is neither here nor there, but it isn’t excellent, is a problem.