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Thursday, March 28, 2024
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Machete Kills movie review: Can't cut it

Rodriguez's latest installment a directionless farce

Film: Machete Kills

Studio: Quick Draw Productions

Release Date: Oct. 11

Grade: C

With Machete, Robert Rodriguez (Spy Kids: All the Time in the World in 4D) exercised his penchant for trashy B-movie exploitation style with a combination of burlesque humor and outrageous, hyperbolic violence. With Machete Kills, he exhausts his own method, making stylized hyper-violence as dull as the blade his lead character utilizes with mastery.

Danny Trejo (Pendejo) reprises the eponymous role of Machete, an indestructible, primal force of nature who used to be a Mexican federal agent and has now been recruited by the president of the United States (Charlie Sheen (credited as Carlos Estevez), Scary MoVie) to save the world.

A deranged terrorist and part-time humanist revolutionary - experiencing multiple personality disorder - Mendez (Demian Bichir, Dom Hemingway) is one of the largest international threats there is; he has had the implementation of an explosive device connected to his heart to hold the world hostage to the rhythm of its own beat - if his heart stops, a nuclear missile automatically gets launched toward Washington.

But it doesn't take the unraveling of its primary plotline for Machete Kills to initiate the bloodshed; within minutes into the film, the carnage erupts. The sensationalist splatter of human body parts occurs rapidly amidst a raunchy backdrop of choppy, gratuitous spectacle.

The movie is designed to be tawdry - and it thinks that's where it can derive its charm. With the exception of a few moments of clever, whimsical dialogue and action so implausible it incites a self-deprecating self-awareness one can momentarily appreciate, the film fails miserably at satire - too immersed in the very things it tries to poke fun at.

At times, Rodriguez playfully skewers genre movies with an amusing sense of ironic composition. In recent years, the auteur filmmaker has earned a reputation that has made his films a place actors have perplexingly found attractive. And here, we see that manifest in a cast so star-studded it leaves you puzzled how so many of these actors signed up to occupy such small roles in an overall piece of narrative illogic.

The cast includes: Cuba Gooding Jr. (Lee Daniels' The Butler), Mel Gibson (Get the Gringo), Antonio Banderas (Justin and the Knights of Valor), Sofia Vergara (Modern Family), Jessica Alba (Escape from Planet Earth) and Lady Gaga (The Simpsons).

Sheen graces the screen in his play-hard, party-hard persona as POTUS - and it reminds you what world you've entered when 10 minutes into the movie, the president drinks from a shot glass.

Gibson doesn't enter the plot (if you want to call it that) until the second half of the picture, as he is discovered as the creator of the missile launcher wired inside Mendez. He is a billionaire with the aspiration of wreaking havoc on planet earth - which he plans to euphorically witness watching from outer space.

Gibson's naughty demeanor actually works well in the role; he has a knack for conveying a sicko with deleterious intentions - hard to imagine where he gets it from.

The film itself is wedged in between two coming attractions for future films of Rodriquez's - a sequel to this sequel. It's called Machete Kills Again... In Outer Space! and it promises to deliver casting again some of the usual players we have already grown accustomed to in this series.

If Machete Kills is a worn-out piece of dreck, and if the history of sequels taking a series downward holds true, the next installment promises to be another yawn inducer. Even when it seems fun, it fatigues every particle of its amusement by refusing to practice any technical restrain.

It is an overemphasized, overindulgent, overdone work of exploitation. And for all its incessant packing, it has everything but a message; it's all style and no substance.

Rodriguez has a lot of fun with the endless homage to Star Wars throughout the picture, but Star Wars, whatever it might be, has content embedded in its flair. Style isn't there for its own sake; it's there to convey meaning.

When exploitation films work, they do so because they have purpose. For instance, Melvin Von Peebles' Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song really has something to say. And for all its reverence for tradition, Machete Kills seems to forget that key ingredient. And that is its fatal flaw.

email: arts@ubspectrum.com


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