Machete Review! You F*’kd with the Wrong Mexican!

‘You Just F**ked with the Wrong Mexican’ Danny Trejo sums up Robert Rodriguez’s new film Machete so eloquently with that one sentence. Danny Trejo stars in MACHETE as… you guessed it MACHETE. His first leading role the film directed by Robert Rodriguez is based off the faux trailer which appeared during Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s GrindHouse double feature.

Although you might expect this film to be quite shallow because of its origins I am here to tell you that all things considered Machete offers a lot more than you might expect and is easily on par with Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror.

In Machete Danny Trejo stars as a Mexican day worker who is hired to kill the Texas Senator played by Robert Deniro. He is quickly double crossed and as noted in the opening line of my review sets about to unleash unholy hell on every one who crosses him.

Along the way we meet a sordid cast of characters including Michelle Rodriguez who plays an ass kicking vigilante defending the latino people, Jessica Alba the incredibly hot ICE agent who loves to shower with the curtain open and our favourite karate chopper Steven Segal as a Mexican drug lord. Machete is a perfect mix of A list actors, and b-movie masters including the legendary FX man and ‘genre tough guy’ Tom Savini and the always entertaining Cheech Marin as the ‘padre with a shotgun’.

Machete is exactly what you would expect. Its violent, its unapologetic and it packs insane violence from opening minutes to closing seconds. Machete is unapologetic sexualized violence with a distinct grindhouse look and feel. Featuring bloody mutilation, Jessica Alba naked in the shower and Lindsay Lohan naked in a ménage a trios Machete is THE guys flick of the year. With a body count that will put any Sly Stallone film to shame and make the Terminator jealous Machete is violent, cheesy, action packed and unapologetic, exactly how a grindhouse movie should be!

For me the film had an underlying message of compassion and the wrongs bestowed upon Mexican migrants both legal and illegal but as much as I picked up on that I didn’t feel I was being force fed a political message and still loved the film. Whether or not Robert intended the under laying political message or not its a credit to his talents that a movie that is this violent and set within the b-movie genre can deliver a message at all.

Tongue in cheek humour a well thought out script and a fast paced action packed film make Machete a fun thrill ride that every genre fan can appreciate.