Rodriguez Takes Mexploitation to the Next Level with Machete!
Sheldon A. Wiebe EclipseMagazine.com 09/03/10 05:47 PM
If you love exploitation flicks, there's a very good chance you'll revel in Machete. It's got an iconic hero, gunfights, fist fights, sword fights, missiles, Gatling guns, some very impressive lo-riders, evil villains, hot women and more blood guts and veins in one's teeth than any movie in recent memory – at least one that wasn't a pointless horror/slasher flick with no plot.
From the Machete's opening moments, in which the incorruptible title character's refusal to take a less thorough approach to his job resulting in the death of his partner, his wife and daughter [the latter not actually seen onscreen], it's apparent that Rodriguez has nailed the violence and surprising wit of the best of those old exploitation flicks.
Once he really gets going, we get a movie about the corrupt manipulators of politics who are plotting to put an end to illegals entering country from Mexico – not to actually keep them out, but to drive up the need for their cheap labor, but only through them. The men behind this plot include Mexican drug lord Torrez [Steven Segal], Texas senator McLaughlin [Robert DeNiro] and his executive aide, Booth [Jeff Fahey]. In their quest for profit, they enlist the aide of a "vigilante" named Stillman [Don Johnson] and a hitman named Osiris [Tom Savini].
Booth hires Machete to assassinate McLaughlin, but of that's just a ruse. While someone else shoots the senator in the leg, Machete is supposed to take the blame. Unfortunately to paraphrase the tag from the original fake Machete trailer, this time they [messed] with the wrong Mexican [don't worry, Rofriguex finds a way to get the original tag into the movie in a fresh and funny manner].
On the side of the angels, we have Luz [Michelle Rodriguez], Machete's brother, Padre [Cheech Marin], and a couple of young Latinos named Julio [Daryl Sabara] and Jorge [Gilbert Trejo]. Machete [Danny Trejo] even persuades an ICE [Immigration] Agent [Jessica Alba] to join the cause.
Of course, where you have an over-the-top exploitation flick, there has to be sex to go with the violence. Here, the sex comes as part of Machete's revenge on Booth and the senator – and involves June and April [Lindsay Lohan], Booth's wife and daughter. There are other moments of nudity, too, including a moment with Alba in a shower…
If Arizona hadn't enacted its current immigration law, Machete might have been a grade A blood and sex romp, but instead, the film has become a rather pointed reply to that law. Indeed, there are more than a few moments where Rodriguez allows polemic to take up a bit too much time and that does detract from Machete's frenetic pacing and slashing wit.
Overall, though, Machete is good, dirty, bloody fun – and the stoic Trejo makes an effective iconic hero. If you don't walk out of the theater afterward feeling exhilarated, then you just don't get the spirit of a great exploitation flick.

[QUOTE=Blutarsky]
Rodriguez Takes Mexploitation to the Next Level with Machete!
Sheldon A. Wiebe EclipseMagazine.com 09/03/10 05:47 PM
If you love exploitation flicks, there's a very good chance you'll revel in Machete. It's got an iconic hero, gunfights, fist fights, sword fights, missiles, Gatling guns, some very impressive lo-riders, evil villains, hot women and more blood guts and veins in one's teeth than any movie in recent memory – at least one that wasn't a pointless horror/slasher flick with no plot.
From the Machete's opening moments, in which the incorruptible title character's refusal to take a less thorough approach to his job resulting in the death of his partner, his wife and daughter [the latter not actually seen onscreen], it's apparent that Rodriguez has nailed the violence and surprising wit of the best of those old exploitation flicks.
Once he really gets going, we get a movie about the corrupt manipulators of politics who are plotting to put an end to illegals entering country from Mexico – not to actually keep them out, but to drive up the need for their cheap labor, but only through them. The men behind this plot include Mexican drug lord Torrez [Steven Segal], Texas senator McLaughlin [Robert DeNiro] and his executive aide, Booth [Jeff Fahey]. In their quest for profit, they enlist the aide of a "vigilante" named Stillman [Don Johnson] and a hitman named Osiris [Tom Savini].
Booth hires Machete to assassinate McLaughlin, but of that's just a ruse. While someone else shoots the senator in the leg, Machete is supposed to take the blame. Unfortunately to paraphrase the tag from the original fake Machete trailer, this time they [messed] with the wrong Mexican [don't worry, Rofriguex finds a way to get the original tag into the movie in a fresh and funny manner].
On the side of the angels, we have Luz [Michelle Rodriguez], Machete's brother, Padre [Cheech Marin], and a couple of young Latinos named Julio [Daryl Sabara] and Jorge [Gilbert Trejo]. Machete [Danny Trejo] even persuades an ICE [Immigration] Agent [Jessica Alba] to join the cause.
Of course, where you have an over-the-top exploitation flick, there has to be sex to go with the violence. Here, the sex comes as part of Machete's revenge on Booth and the senator – and involves June and April [Lindsay Lohan], Booth's wife and daughter. There are other moments of nudity, too, including a moment with Alba in a shower…
If Arizona hadn't enacted its current immigration law, Machete might have been a grade A blood and sex romp, but instead, the film has become a rather pointed reply to that law. Indeed, there are more than a few moments where Rodriguez allows polemic to take up a bit too much time and that does detract from Machete's frenetic pacing and slashing wit.
Overall, though, Machete is good, dirty, bloody fun – and the stoic Trejo makes an effective iconic hero. If you don't walk out of the theater afterward feeling exhilarated, then you just don't get the spirit of a great exploitation flick.
[/QUOTE]
The more gore the better for Blut!
He loves his chainsaw!
S.

Machete (2010)

Danny Trejo plays Machete, a drug cartel’s sinister enforcer.
Growl, and Let the Severed Heads Fall Where They May
By STEPHEN HOLDEN

Conveniently timed to sprinkle gasoline on the fires of the immigration debate, Robert Rodriguez’s splatter comedy “Machete” has already riled up hardliners in advance of its release. Although laughter is the appropriate response to this pulpy, lighthearted gorefest, its pro-Mexican, anti-American stance is so gleefully inflammatory that some incensed nativists may refuse to get the joke.

Reacting to the film’s leaked screenplay, the radio talk show firebrand Alex Jones posted a YouTube video in which he warned that “Machete” could foment a “race war.” A comedy showdown with the Wayans brothers would seem more likely.

“Machete,” co-directed by Mr. Rodriguez and Ethan Maniquis from a script by Mr. Rodriguez and his cousin Álvaro Rodriguez, begins with a massacre involving a naked woman and many severed heads, and it keeps on slamming and banging with a gleeful, nose-thumbing insouciance.

Making fun of itself as it goes along, this live-action comic book, with roots in the pungent swamp of 1970s B movies, was foreshadowed in a fake trailer Mr. Rodriguez made for “Grindhouse,” his 2007 collaboration with Quentin Tarantino. The pace is swift, the tone playful, the screenplay peppered with one-liners. Whether mowed down by gunfire or dispatched by sheaves of blades, the bodies pile up in split-second blasts of carnage.

A central joke is the casting of Danny Trejo, the 66-year-old Mexican-American actor and veteran of several Rodriguez movies (including “Desperado” and “Spy Kids”) in his first lead role as the heroic title character. With his buffalo-nickel head; craggy, unsmiling face; stringy hair; and superhuman facility as a knife thrower, Mr. Trejo offers an amusing inside-out caricature of the Hollywood stereotype of a Latin American drug cartel’s sinister enforcer who speaks in growled sound bites (“Machete don’t text”).

An ex-Federale, Machete has escaped to Texas after clashing with Torrez (Steven Seagal, in a rare turn as a villain), a Mexican drug kingpin who owns every politician on both sides of the border. In Torrez’s pocket is McLaughlin (Robert De Niro), a Texas senator who campaigns on a rabid anti-immigration platform and whom Mr. De Niro plays as a crinkly-eyed, hate-spewing hybrid of Lyndon B. Johnson and George W. Bush; one campaign commercial compares illegal immigrants to cockroaches. From his smirking lips issue rhetorical bombshells that even the most fervent supporter of Arizona’s new immigration law wouldn’t dare utter in public.

Hired to assassinate McLaughlin, Machete is unknowingly set up as the fall guy. During the botched attempt, Machete is wounded, and in the movie’s funniest gag, he escapes from the hospital by lowering himself on dangling intestines. Slicing, stabbing and shooting his way to glory, he ascends from day laborer to leader of an army of United States-bound Mexicans wielding garden tools.

Women melt before Machete, who barely notices. Whether the task at hand is servicing a beauty or disposing of a dozen people in under five seconds, this monosyllabic, expressionless killing machine discharges it with cool, deadpan indifference.

Funny throwaway jokes include the casting of Lindsay Lohan in a flashy cameo as April, a rich, scowling slut who dons a nun’s habit to wield a machine gun. She is the daughter of McLaughlin’s corrupt right-hand man, Booth (Jeff Fahey), whose videotaped confessions to his priest include his lust for April. She and her sexy blond mother, June (Alicia Rachel Marek), divert Machete in a threesome. Cheech Marin plays Machete’s brother, Padre, a priest who is crucified in his own church.

Completing the unholy trinity of rotten, greedy Americans, along with McLaughlin and Booth, is Von (Don Johnson), a border vigilante who keeps his own army ready to slaughter any encroaching Mexican horde.

The only American with a conscience, Sartana (Jessica Alba), is a hard-nosed immigration officer who switches sides. The movie’s heroine, Luz (Michelle Rodriguez, who is not related to the director), a taco stand operator known as She (pronounced Che), also runs “the network,” a secret revolutionary Mexican army waiting for the signal to rise up.

For all its political button pushing, “Machete” is too preposterous to qualify as satire. The only viewers it is likely to upset are the same kind of people who once claimed that the purple Tinky Winky in “Teletubbies” promoted a gay agenda. A pop culture conspiracy is usually in the paranoid eye of the beholder.

“Machete” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has extreme gore, nudity and sexual situations.

MACHETE

Only to the people who made it and some of the loony hollywood left,




To the rest it is just another action flix. A bad one actually because it opened in 3rd place behind an equally awful "the American" and a mediocre "takers" that opened a week earlier.

Funny how it seems how most anti-American movies seem to tank.

Splatter comedy....Tony I guess you did not read the review.....because you didnt get the joke either ....youre just another riled up hardliner Tony they got you pegged
Danny Trejo plays Machete, a drug cartel’s sinister enforcer.
Growl, and Let the Severed Heads Fall Where They May
By STEPHEN HOLDEN---NY Times

"Conveniently timed to sprinkle gasoline on the fires of the immigration debate, Robert Rodriguez’s splatter comedy “Machete” has already riled up hardliners in advance of its release. Although laughter is the appropriate response to this pulpy, lighthearted gorefest, its pro-Mexican, anti-American stance is so gleefully inflammatory that some incensed nativists may refuse to get the joke."

Your Can’t-Miss Picks for the Week Ahead in Culture
'Machete' Opens Weekend at #1

As summer film season officially ends, the crime film Machete pulled in $3.9 million on Friday at the domestic box office, just beating George Clooney's latest The American, which took in $3.8 million. If the latter keeps up the momentum it has shown since opening on Wednesday, it's projected to move into first place for the weekend. Last weekend’s top earner, Takers slipped into third place, while Warner Bros latest from the department of syrupy romantic comedies, Going the Distance opened fifth, raking in just $2.3 million.

Robert Rodriguez own this country an apology over his piece of crap movie. Very disappointed expected something like EL MARIACHI and in return got bombarded with anti-american propaganda garbage.

It is a joke .....and a caricature......How was Cheech ?

Whether it irks good ol' 'Merican patriots, Latino-American groups, the right-wing talking-head brigade or just plain everyone, the upshot could support the movie in theaters.

"I think the movie is someone's personal agenda," McGauley said. "But it seems interesting. If you don't have a sense of humor, no matter what side you're on, it probably makes you a boring person. I imagine that a lot of people who complained will be the first ones to buy a ticket."