It was rumored for quite some time after Grindhouse that Robert Rodriguez would make the hilariously awesome fake trailer for Machete into a full length film. But as incredible an opening as it made for the epic double feature, I never truly thought Rodriguez was serious. After all, much like his much more successful brethren Quentin Tarantino, he is a man who likes to talk about projects that never actually pass the development stage. However, all the talk about Machete actually turned out to be true. But was it really a wise decision to stretch the trailer into a full length feature?

After watching his wife get murdered in front of him, ex-Federale Machete (Danny Trejo) is banished out of Mexico and stuck in Texas on an illegal green card. He spends his days doing manual labour for cheap alongside other fellow exploited workers. He gets hired to kill Senator McLaughlin (Robert DeNiro), who has a plan or two about keeping the illegal Mexican workers out of the States -- but ends up getting double crossed, and left for dead. With half of Texas after him, not to mention Mexican drug lord Torrez (Steven Seagal – yes, you read that correctly), Machete seeks out his revenge.

The plot description may not sound like much, but that is only because it covers the mere basics. Much like Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Rodriguez has stuffed far too many supporting characters and even more subplots into the mix, and the film drowns as a result of it. It never seems to be able to stay on one plot thread for longer than a few minutes before it jumps onto another. It lacks a cohesive ideal, and even at its best of moments, it feels like a jumbled mess of overflowing thoughts. Some of these plotlines easily could have been saved for a sequel, a tie-in comic book series or even cut out entirely. Throwing them into the film just feels like overkill, and makes it a lot sloppier than it should be. It was marketed as being a Mexploitation flick, so why make it overly complicated and worn down?

What makes things worse is the fact that some of these plot lines are so needless that they make a ridiculously energetic film feel incredibly boring in more than a few instances. The running time is just over 100 minutes, but it feels well over two hours. The entire scheme revolving around illegal Mexicans and how they should or should not be kept out of the United States is a good thread to latch onto, but not for an otherwise goofy genre picture like this. The movie was never meant to be serious, and to me, was always intended as a one-off, fun picture to make. Instead, Rodriguez lets it get boiled too far down into a movie with some form of political commentary, but it never sticks, or actually feels right being in the film. The trailer never suggests a political slant to the film, so it is clearly a new device of Rodriguez’s that he should have left out of the film entirely.

Another weird element is that every single shot from the original trailer from Grindhouse is in the film, whether it fits the scene or not. Some of them look okay, and have been edited in rather seamlessly alongside new footage. But other shots just have a bizarre, otherworldly look to them that blatantly make them look like they were part of something else at another point. I thought it was clever at first to include the shots, but got increasingly annoyed with how different they looked compared to the rest of the film. Their gritty, scarred up style fits the Grindhouse look, but that look is not maintained throughout the entire running time of Machete. Had it been maintained or stayed consistent, I think I would have liked that stylistic choice a whole lot more. As it is, it just does not fit and seems to react more as Rodriguez and company not having a consistent vision of what the film should look like.

For all the complaints, Machete still has a lot of good things going for it. For one, it is both ridiculously hilarious and incredibly brutal; often in the same sequence. When the film is not trying to be overly serious with its political intentions, it is taking joy in allowing Machete to dispatch his victims in the most gruesome of ways possible. Never did I think I would ever see a man use another man’s intestines as a rope to jump from one ledge to another. It is these scenes that live up to the promise of the trailer, and makes this ridiculous idea into the film it was always meant to be. But again, there is a real lack of consistency overall, and it really does hurt at every turn.

Acting-wise, there are no particular standouts, as everyone seems to be hamming it up or overacting to the point of verging on parody. Trejo, the most consistent supporting character actor working currently, is awesome as Machete, but the title character never seems to be treated like it. The ensemble aspect seems to get the best of him at most points, and he never really gets to shine as an actual actor, as opposed to a glorified bad ass. Special props go to both Jeff Fahey and Don Johnson, who shine as they gleefully overact their way through the film.

In parts, Machete is an awesome experience for anyone who always wished the fake trailer would become a real movie. As a final cohesive product, the film has way too many characters and ideas. It is this lack of consistency, that easily could have been fixed, that is the real disappointment.

  -- David Baldwin