If the first Machete was the illegitimate love-child of a fake trailer carrying a surprisingly sincere and strong message about immigration from the side of the immigrants, then Machete Kills is its crazed half-brother wandering from town to town never really achieving anything but having a blast in the process.
In a way this outing has unwittingly (or wittingly… who knows) become a prime example of the sort of so-bad-it’s-good movie experience that the whole Grindhouse “event” was meant to be paying homage to {but not actually being}. Machete 1 played it relatively straight (wherein lay most of its humour). however Machete Kills absolutely does not in any way shape or form. And that’s not such a good thing.
Worryingly, the film borders on (and perhaps even crosses over into) Austin Powers/Hot Shots territory on too many occasions and sanitises much of the sexual content that was dealt with so gratuitously in Machete 1. There are no nude women pulling mobile phones out of their vaginas or incestuous mother/daughter poolside romps here. In fact, apart from the odd swear word and suspiciously heightened cartoonish blood and guts, you could almost mistake this for a rejected Spy Kids outing (none of which I’ve seen, but I get the funny feeling I'm watching something similar).
It’s quite short at 103 minutes (compared to a Michael Bay or Gore Verbinski snooze-fest) but feels longer, to the point where I actually had to check the back of the DVD box at one stage to see how long I had to wait until I could go to bed. Which is a sad state of affairs.
This film tests your loyalty but also rewards it. It seems to be trying so hard to make you hate it, but you can’t because all the things that made you love Machete 1 are still here (albeit embarrassingly sanitised): the blood, the babes, the bazookas and the babes. But unnecessarily thrown into the mix are protracted scenes of exposition and flashbacks spliced with convoluted and recurring plot strands and characters that don’t add anything to the experience.
We don’t need to know, we don’t want to know and, most importantly, we don’t have time to know.
There’s a bomb to defuse. Or something.
Get on with it, indeed.
Danny Trejo's limitations as an actor are woefully revealed by a script that simply gives him far too much to say. He's more effective as the strong, silent type, especially with that beautifully grizzled face that says more than ten pages of dialogue ever could. Bizarrely, his character has become somewhat cowardly since we last met him, but like the secret formula to most television sitcoms, it’s not the title character that’s interesting, it’s the entourage of weirdos they just can’t seem to shake off and who inadvertently end up taking over the whole show. I think the official Hollywood term for this is “Cybill-itis”. But this time around the roll-call of has-beens isn’t quite so interesting and neither are the newcomers (Carlos Estévez is no Charlie Sheen). Dissociative identity disorder-suffering bad guy/good guy/naïve pawn Marcos Mendez played by Demián Bichir is embarrassingly irritating (was he meant to be? I hope not) and you can’t help but feel sorry for Mel Gibson for stooping to this level; he’s not in this to be ironic like Robert De Niro (although De Niro does seem to be putting his career into a nose dive on purpose just to annoy everyone) – he actually NEEDS the work now.
I still like Mel, though.
Who can hate that face?
Oh yeah... everyone.
So, gone is the where-do-I-know-them-from sideshow novelty aspect, effective political satire/activism and shocking level of sex and violence of the first film, and arrived has the watered-down, confused, silly shenanigans that we were all sort of expecting in the first place but didn’t realise we didn’t want or need.
I think you can call this a mixed review.
I just hope that Machete Kills Again… In Space turns out to be less bad-Bond-film and ALL MACHETE.
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