After watching “Machete” I wonder what’s wrong with Robert Rodriguez, but I don’t wonder long. The all-terrain movie man has run laps around any idea we have of Hollywood decency. He cashes in as director of the Spy Kids franchise on odd-numbered years and collaborates with bloody Quentin Tarantino on the even ones. So what’s he getting at? What’s his game?
With “Machete,” the game is clear: Americanizing an underappreciated genre dear to the director’s heart. It’s called “Mexploitation,” and from the first machete-wielding roundhouse decapitation it gives no quarter.
The movie is one long string of campy gore, shoot-outs, souped-up lowriders from the barrio, T&A, racist politicians, more T&A and lots of beautiful women bedded by one of the ugliest movie heroes in recent history.
The movie takes its name from the man, and the man from his favorite weapon: Machete the ex-Mexican federal agent who hacked his way through half of Mexico’s drug cartels with a machete. So “Machete” is B-grade and proud of it.
“Proud” also describes the film’s reactionary Texas Senator McLaughlin, a hard-liner against immigration who takes to vigilant border patrol with his fringe supporters. McLaughlin’s campaign ads promise an “electrified border fence” and “no amnesty for parasites,” which would be funny if it weren’t such an uncanny parallel to contemporary American politics.
Echoes of Arizona’s real-life immigration debacle abound in “Machete,” but so does the very best script-writing that exploitation budgets can buy (although Rodriguez himself co-wrote the script). The back-and-forth between immigration officer Sartana (Jessica Alba) and revolutionary taco-truck driver Luz (Michelle Rodriguez) is charged with comedy, eroticism and political double entendre.
Between the two drop-dead gorgeous Mexicanas and all the other distracting explosions and ridiculous self-mockery, it’s easy to overlook the movie’s surprising political sophistication — surprising not because we didn’t know Rodriguez could be sophisticated, but because we don’t really know why he bothers.
What with a couple of good shots of Lindsay Lohan’s vastly overrated tachitos, most directors would be content to let the film’s significance slip by the wayside. In a way, it’s too funny and just too damn fun to have any deeper meaning. No moral can be extracted from a movie whose hero uses a man’s long intestine as an escape rope.
And yet, it’s partially this silliness that lends “Machete” its poignancy. Machete doesn’t really care about any mission or senator or border fence. Those things are distractions, and he’s got real work to find.
