Enormously fun Robert Rodriguez tribute to grindhouse – it comfortable carries for a whole feature, although it could do with 15 minutes cut out of it. The plot is good basic, exploitation: Machete is a Mexican cop betrayed by his colleagues and has his wife and daughter killed (though we never see what happens to the daughter). The baddies don’t kill him though and three years later he’s living on the streets (I felt we missed out on a sequence here). He gets drawn into a plot straight out of Shooter – an assassination where he’s double crossed so he goes on the rampage.
There’s plenty of action and blood (it’s called machete for a reason); there is some nudity and sex, but not a lot – the naughties were quite prim. There’s some boobs at the beginning and from Lindsay Lohan’s body double but that’s about it. The quality of the cast is astonishingly high; Lindsay Lohan is the best value, sending up her modern image (spoilt, drug addicted, sexy, fame hungry, making amateur porn) – it’s a real shame her part isn’t bigger. Jessica Alba and Michelle Rodgriguez were born for this sort of movie, especially the latter (I kept expecting the revelation one of them would be Machete’s daughter but it never happened); Jeff Fahey, Steven Seagal and Don Johnson form one of the strongest trilogy of villains in recent memory… and you can throw in Robert de Niro too. Oh and Cheech Marin. Danny Trejo totally carries the film as a lead – I could really see him in a bunch of these movies as star.
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