Robert Rodriguez

Machete Kills (2013)

André Crous

The sequel to Machete is a sad film that leaves us despondent and makes us yearn for the audacity of the original.

machete-killsUSA
2*

Director:
Robert Rodriguez
Screenwriter:
Kyle Ward
Director of Photography:
Robert Rodriguez

Running time: 110 minutes

Once you’ve ripped out someone’s intestines and used them to scale a building, there’s really no way for you to up the ante. But in a nod to the film’s predecessor, one of many references to countless films, Robert Rodriguez’s Machete Kills charges ahead and lets the title character rip out his assailant’s intestines once more and sling them into a helicopter’s fast-moving rotor blade so that we can have blood and guts splatter all over the camera lens.

If you never saw the first Machete, you may not mind this as much, but anyone seeing this follow-up will miss the good ol’ times of Machete’s former adventures. This sequel, and its main character, is sad from beginning to end, and we simply cannot allow ourselves to enjoy such a waste of talent, especially as the melancholy of the sometimes sardonic Machete is completely unbecoming.

The man with the machete, who used to be a Federale, still loves to wield his weapon of choice, slicing and dicing his enemies with the poise of a master chef. But in this instalment, he has to face some revolutionary technology that is straight from a B-movie director’s wet dream. Case in point: a defective molecular disruptor that turns people inside out. If he can successfully evade this device and the women wearing bras fitted out with machine guns, he may just save the world.

Opening with a fake trailer for this sequel’s sequel, titled Machete Kills Again … in Space!, the film doesn’t beat about the bush about its intentions: We are being prepared – or set up – for the ultimate finale that will take place in a galaxy not very far away, where technology from many decades ago will vie for our attention amid some expected carnage. The narrator boldly claims that Leonardo DiCaprio may be starring, then admits the actor is subject to change.

It all seems a bit silly, but while we watch this second part of the now-official trilogy, we discover many of the characters are the same, and by the end of the film they’re all being beamed up beyond the exosphere. Rodriguez’s version of space looks incredibly boring, but perhaps he will bring the sexy back.

Unfortunately, there is no such sexiness on display in Machete Kills. The first film’s many moments of excess, which had some of the same flippancy of Tarantino’s Death Proof but without all the stylistic flourishes, provided a sensational spectacle.

At present, however, it seems Rodriguez’s imagination has run dry, as he makes wholly inappropriate references, including Mission: Impossible and the television series 24. At one point, the soundtrack even alludes to James Bond.

As it is, the film has too many famous faces anyway – Lady Gaga, Mel Gibson, Cuba Gooding Jr. and Antonio Banderas are all villains, some more super than others – although, more often than not, they are just masks that hide the true identity of yet another mask. Rodriguez must have been aware how ridiculous this approach is, as was made clear at the time John Woo’s version of Mission: Impossible was released, but even when he is using it for fun, it becomes annoying.

The only face that brings a smile to ours is the one put forward by the overly ambitious U.S. President Rathcock, played by the one actor who has nothing to lose: Charlie Sheen, credited by his real name Carlos Estévez. Rathcock wants to prove he can live up to both parts of his name: For the first part, he employs Machete, but the second he can do himself.

He tells Machete he will become a U.S. citizen if he accepts the mission to kill Mendez, a Mexican drug lord who has a missile pointed straight at the United States. In this way, he indirectly visits his wrath upon his enemy. But his campaign videos speak of his pornographic lust for violence, as he poses with enormous weaponry to make clear his intention to safeguard the Second Amendment. He mixes some of the more objectionable traits of recent U.S. presidents to create a skirt-chasing cowboy that is both a caricature and frighteningly familiar.

But with Machete’s name in the title, one would have expected him to have more gravitas in the film itself, instead of being a bit of a sideshow to all the opulent tastelessness we have to witness, including the bit with the intestines. Machete is demeaned as a character because one of his most impressive skills turns out to be his ability to dodge bullets, or to be sprayed and still survive. Even in a film that aspires to being a B-movie, such a lack of imagination is unacceptable.

Let’s hope the third film is either wildly different, with pre-production time heavily spent on character development, or gets scrapped altogether – preferably with a mean machete.

Planet Terror (2007)

André Crous

USA
3.5*

Director:
Robert Rodriguez
Screenwriter: 
Robert Rodriguez
Director of Photography: 
Robert Rodriguez

Running time: 105 minutes

It’s a bad night in Texas: The zombies are out. Planet Terror‘s take on the zombie film is much grittier (read: more steamy, more violent, more bloody and less funny) than commercial ventures such as Shaun of the Dead, and what it sets out to do it does very well. The film is made as an homage to zombie movies and the kinds of violent films shown at “grindhouse theatres” in the 1970s. In combination with Quentin Tarantino’s Deathproof, these two films constitute Grindhouse.

The film starts with a fake trailer (which would later be done for real and released under the same name) for Machete, in which one of Mexico’s Federales hacks off limbs with a machete. The trailer sets the tone for the movie we are about to see, although very quickly the main feature reveals itself to be even more blood-soaked, and while there are some moments of comedy by actors who deliver rather witty lines deadpan, the film’s dialogue overall is quite serious.

We meet a number of characters who will soon come together to defeat the zombie uprising, including gogo dancer Cherry Darling. On the night she decides to call it quits at the strip club, she runs into El Wray, a former boyfriend, at a steakhouse with the best meat in Texas. Cherry Darling is played by Rose McGowan, while Freddie Rodriguez is El Wray, who is much more talented in the art of mass murder than he lets on, especially when the victims are undead.

Bruce Willis also makes two brief appearances as a general who wants to immunise himself against the green vapour that turns everybody to zombies; he is presented in a way that evokes a kind of alienation (as far as I can remember, he never interacts with another character in the same frame).

The story, which takes place during one night, is very simple: Zombies arrive; some fight the zombies while others turn into zombies; lots of explosions and bloodletting, led mostly by the unlikely hero El Wray; survivors escape to Mexico. There is also some domestic drama with a doctor (Josh Brolin), his unfaithful wife who is also a nurse (Marley Shelton) and their young boy.

The film was made for its visual effects, and the zombies’ bubbling epidermis is consistently revolting. So too are the instances of cannibalism (although zombies don’t seem to eat other zombies, they do like the taste of human flesh) and the drops of blood on the lens of the camera. The scenes of violence are disproportionately bloody compared with the bodies being decimated, and often the bodies seem to disintegrate on impact with a slow-moving motor vehicle, releasing an amazing amount of blood that gushes in every direction.

Planet Terror contains numerous jump cuts, often timed with specific actions in the film itself, and in this way, the film diverges from the films it pretends to emulate since Rodriguez makes visible his evident manipulation of the film itself, instead of the latter being a work that is affected by random factors such as time, heat, friction, etc. Whether this is a good or a bad thing, the viewer will have to decide for himself or herself.

This world is clearly a part of the Grindhouse world that is otherwise defined by Deathproof, and a number of characters appear in both. Also, the show hosted by Jungle Julia, a character in Tarantino’s film, is mentioned here on the radio. But while Tarantino’s universe was conceivably a slightly manipulated version of a world close to our reality, Planet Terror makes a mistake when it mentions Chris Rock by name, thereby pretending both that the world is close to ours and (in being made with the conventions of a zombie film, including the presence of zombies) that it is not. Whatever the viewer’s reading of these finer points, it remains a very entertaining film, though if one took away the fire and the blood, there wouldn’t be much left standing.

Machete (2010)

André Crous

USA
4*

Directors: 
Robert Rodriguez
Ethan Maniquis
Screenwriters:
Robert Rodriguez
Álvaro Rodriguez
Director of Photography: 
Jimmy Lindsey

Running time: 100 minutes

Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil was released in 1958. Essentially the most stylish B-movie ever made, with an opening tracking shot that would be studied in film schools decades later, it famously stars Charlton Heston as a Mexican called Vargas, in spite of him having no accent whatsoever. The choice of Heston, who had played Moses two years earlier in Cecil B. DeMille’s Ten Commandments and would portray the title character in the award-winning Ben-Hur the following year, was contrary to all common sense, but it worked because the film permitted such casting lunacy.

Machete offers a similar performance that initially takes the viewer aback but succeeds in grabbing the viewer’s attention for exactly the same reason as in Welles’s film: Steven Seagal, starring in one of the best films of his career, is cast as a Mexican crime boss named Torrez. I’m not suggesting that Seagal is equal to Heston by any stretch of the imagination, and perhaps he realises as much because at least he tries to go for the accent.

Of course, a review of Machete must pay homage to the work done by Tarantino, starting with the two Kill Bill films and, in particular, the Grindhouse double feature that consisted of his Deathproof and Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror. In fact, Machete is a feature-length adaptation of one of Grindhouse‘s fake trailers, which accompanied the full version (as opposed to the separate films) and are available on the DVDs. In terms of the physical action, Rodriguez continues to relish in his exaggerated representations of bloodletting.

The story is set up as a clash of cultures between the Mexicans, who cross the border, and the Americans who lie in wait, ready to shoot ’em up the moment they set foot on Uncle Sam’s soil. A representative of the xenophobia gripping America, but also, we learn, merely a politician, is Senator John McLaughlin, played by Robert de Niro – his best role in more than 10 years (at least, since Great Expectations). McLaughlin is involved in target practice on Mexicans who cross the border during the night, but he himself is betrayed by an over-ambitious deputy, whose involvement in an assassination attempt causes him to become entangled in Torrez’s affairs.

It all might seem like a big mess, but Machete, played by the very ugly Danny Trejo (an amazingly prolific actor, I learn: His profile on the IMDb claims that he starred in 18 films in 2010 alone, including Machete), separates the wheat from the chaff, or the head from the body, with his big machete.

The film’s B-movie feel naturally helps to create the illusion that everything is permissible, and mistakes in continuity or visual effects may be ascribed to the film’s aspiration to be something unconventional. That is a very clever strategy, and it does cover a lot of ground, but the film is not an entirely homogeneous production, and therefore there is still room for improvement. Don Johnson’s role as Von Jackson, the leader of the group of vigilantes patrolling the border, did not shimmer with the kind of rough energy of any of the other characters, and the directors allowed themselves to be carried away by their own desire to produce something better than a B-movie: During a shoot-out at a church, the bloody action is accompanied by a rendering of “Ave Maria”, which is more reminiscent of the baptism in The Godfather, or scenes from The Boondock Saints, and does not fit with the rest of the filmmaking approach in this film.

Machete is bloody bucket loads of fun. The novelty does wear off after a while, but at least Rodriguez tells his story simply and effectively, without the many metafilmic flourishes that Tarantino would have added, and consequently, it feels like the product of someone who is more interested in the story than the format in which it is presented. The machete is a brutal weapon of choice, and even if we have never seen it used in real life, Machete shows us how it is done – as well as other uses for intestines.