Machete Kills tries again, but misses mark
Story starting to lose its appeal
The Mexican superhero Machete — pronounced mah-chet-ay — made his appearance in 2007 as part of a jokey mock trailer in the jokey mock movie Grindhouse. “They just f —d with the wrong Mexican,” said the narrator. Cut to Danny Trejo, the beautiful-ugly actor whose face looks like what happens when you forget a bag of potatoes in the basement. The notion, to give it a grand name, inspired the 2010 film Machete, and is now responsible for Machete Kills, a sequel that opens with a trailer for something called Machete Kills In Space.
The joke, compiled of B-movie tropes being turned into over-thetop exaggerations — at one stage in the new film, a prostitute fires bullets from a machine gun embedded in her leather bra — will be extended, if we can believe what we see, into scenes of Trejo’s leathered face being encased in an astronaut helmet. Ay caramba!
The appeal of this kind of campy excess is limited, especially when you’re making a copy of a copy of a copy of something whose original appeal was in its low-budget enthusiasm rather than in anything that might be called artistic merit.
Machete glowers, stalks, chops and beheads, and he manages to do it without changing expressions — Trejo has not just the creases of your leather couch, he has its range as well — but to say it “kills” is something of an overstatement.
Director Robert Rodriguez, whose career evinces a fatal soft spot for the bottom half of the double bill, dresses up the material with an authentically incomprehensible plot.
Machete is hired by the womanizing president (Charlie Sheen, appearing as Carlos Estevez but bringing with him Charlie Sheen’s reputed appetites) to stop a mad Mexican revolutionary called Mendez (Demian Bichir) who threatens to launch a missile at Washington.
It’s an odd-couple chase — Mendez, who has multiple personalities, linked with Machete, who has none — that involves a who’s who (or, perhaps, a what the f—?) of Hollywood talent, all of them apparently cast for their ironic appeal.
On their trail, for instance, is an assassin named The Chameleon who can change shape from Cuba Gooding Jr. to Antonio Banderas, with a few surprises in between.
Machete Kills abounds in gory murders, many of them involving palpably false heads rolling on the ground, bleeding chocolate sauce, although there are also a few bad guys chopped up by propeller blades of one type and another.
For love interest there is a parade of B-list stars — Jessica Alba as Machete’s new partner, Michelle Rodriguez as his old one, Sofia Vergara as the head of a gang of gun-wielding prostitutes and Amber Heard as a combination spy and beauty queen (“F — world peace”) — bouncing in their bikini tops as they race through the cheesy, 1970s-looking sets, trying either to kill Machete or to have sexual relations with hiYm.
It’s funny until it’s not. After a while, it feels like Robert Rodriguez may be f— g with the wrong Mexican.