Machete

Review by Anthony Morris

Nothing lives without a heart - okay, plants do, but let's run with this metaphor - and while it might be small and withered even the exploitation film needs to have something pumping blood through its veins to stop it from being nothing but a lifeless automaton. 

Whatever his merits as a writer and director - and most of those merits seem to involve making films fast and relatively cheap - Robert Rodriguez isn't someone known for putting any kind of heart in his films. Which is the big problem with Machete...

Based on a fake trailer made for his and Quentin Tarantino's uneven Grindhouse experiment, Machete manages to look like everything you could ask for in an exploitation film without actually capturing any of the feel of the real deal. 

The story is certainly trashy enough, as machete-wielding Mexican Federale (Danny Trejo) sees his family killed in front of him by an evil drug lord (Steven Seagal).

He then turns up three years later as a day labourer in a Texan border town where the forces of immigrant-bashing evil (a vigilante-leading Don Johnson, Robert DeNiro as a crooked senator) are up against "the network", an organisation helping Mexicans cross the border and led by a taco-shack owner (Michelle Rodriguez). 

Machete gets hired to kill DeNiro's senator as part of a re-election scheme, only when he's betrayed it turns out Machete is hard to kill - unlike pretty much everyone he goes up against. 

It sounds like it should work and certainly individual scenes are over-the-top in all manner of enjoyable and entertaining ways. Having Machete get it on with every woman he comes across to the accompaniment of a sexy bass line never gets old.

More importantly, most of the many machete-based executions are laughably excessive - as are most of the scenery chewing performances, though Seagal's "Mexican" accent deserves special acknowledgment. 

But the film never really works.

Trying to shoe-horn in every one of the moments from the original trailer makes many of them seem rushed and flat, while the plot is both overly complicated and underdone emotionally. 

Even the trashiest exploitation films gave you a reason to care about what was going on: for all the blood splashed about on screen, this remains a disappointingly lifeless affair.

4 out of 5

Machete
Australian release: 11th November, 2010
Official Site: Machete
Cast: Robert De Niro, Jessica Alba, Cheech Marin, Lindsay Lohan, Steven Seagal, Danny Trejo
Director: Robert Rodriguez, Ethan Maniquis