REVIEW: 'Machete' cuts both ways

I mean this in the nicest possible way, but Robert Rodriguez's "Machete" is a movie with something to offend everyone.  Rodriguez regular Danny Trejo, an unlikely leading man to put it mildly, plays the title character, an ex-Federale living as an illegal alien in Texas trying to disappear and forget his tragic past.  Nobody gets to forget tragic pasts in movies like this, especially not when opportunities for revenge drop into their laps.

The trailer for "Machete" came before the movie, inserted as a gag in the Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez collaboration "Grindhouse."  Trejo's Machete is approached by Jeff Fahey to assassinate a state senator over something to do with illegal immigration.  The title character, modeled on previous Trejo characters in Rodriguez movies, is going to get double-crossed and the rest of the cast is then going to be sliced and diced (other than the bare-breasted starlets who are going to have sex with him). 

It may be that Hollywood's been doing backwards for decades.  This could approach actually save shaky studios.  Make the trailer, and if the audiences like it, then make the movie. 

Virtually every scene shown in the fake "Machete" trailer is in the movie, although the attack on the state senator, now played by Robert De Niro as an unholy hybrid of LBJ and JR Ewing, no longer resembles the JFK assassination.  Fahey returns, with Steven Seagal as his Mexican crime lord business partner, and yes, it is a bit of a shock to see Seagal and De Niro in the same movie, especially since De Niro looks to be in better shape.  Jessica Alba plays an immigration agent and Michelle Rodriguez, hot off "Avatar," has an even more kick-ass role here.  One of the bare-breasted starlets in the fake trailer has turned into Lindsay Lohan, cast against type as a drug addict, and a racist vigilante is played by Don Johnson, given an "introducing" credit.  Cheech Marin returns as the shotgun-toting priest, and still has the line "God has mercy.  I don't."

The film is already marked for protests by white supremacists, who don't like the sympathetic treatment of illegal immigrants (and the fact that the bad guys are mostly white). That may be nothing next to the reactions some Catholics will to the Cheech Marin character, a priest who breaks the Seal of Confession and gets into a gunfight in the sanctuary.  Then there's the torture scene involving crucifixion, which also takes place in a church. About the only time Lindsay Lohan wears clothes in the second half of the film she kills people while wearing a nun's habit.

Then there's the violence.  "Machete" features liberal doses of zombie movie-level carnage, including but not limited to multiple decapitations, dismemberment, and disemboweling.  You're going to hear about this from someone, but I'll put up the "Spoiler Alert" sign.  It is true that Machete makes an escape from a hospital by disemboweling a bad guy with a surgical instrument and then rappeling down the side of the building with his small intestine.  On the other hand, the climactic swordfight between Trejo and Seagal is hard to take seriously.  Seagal appears to weigh a deep-fried Twinkie more than a domestic SUV these days, and it requires a major suspension of disbelief to think he's going distance with the dangerous-looking Trejo. 

While we're discussing the hard "R" rating, we might mention the sexual situations and drug references. There is a pot-smoking scene. As was common in R-rated seventies movies, while there is frontal nudity with female characters, there's nearly no depiction of actual sexual activity.

"Machete" seems to want to take the illegal immigration controversy seriously, but not too much else. At times, it doesn't seem to know whether it's a loving homage to cheesy B-movies or whether it is a cheesy B-movie. That indecision keeps it from reaching the heights Quentin Tarantino tends to hit.

Rodriguez is an odd sort of auteur.  Never a one-man show--he co-directs here with Ethan Manquis, co-wrote the screenplay with Tarantino/Rodriguez camp up-and-comer Alvaro Rodriguez, was visual effects supervisor and played in the band.   He doesn't do anything alone but has his hand in everything.  This time he's made a cult classic in the making, and almost certainly launched prolific character actor Danny Trejo to unlikely stardom.  It's almost worth the price of admission just to see Jessica Alba deliver an impassioned "Braveheart" speech.   Never boring, "Machete" is a highly entertaining, if cheesy, modern take on seventies nostalgia, as long as you know what you're getting into.