MACHETE

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Starring Danny Trejo

Trailer

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Progress is an ebbing, churning cycle of death and rebirth, tossing aside established concepts and lumps of history in its wake and laughing, always laughing long and hard into the eternal dusk. Machete’s a B-Movie, and back in the days before you were thinking and crying and stuff that meant that it would be a back-up feature for an A-movie, aka the thing people came to see starring Cary Grant. A filler, a distraction, an extra bang for a buck, it was never expected to match the quality of the a-list and very momentarily-distracting it was too. We don’t have them anymore, progress having warped cinema to the point where people don’t get any extra entertainment for their huge wads of cash, unless you count the same Simon Pegg trailer played TWICE IN THE SPACE OF EIGHT MINUTES. So Machete’s not a B-movie, it can’t be, ‘B-Movie’ isn’t a genre. Except it is now, and it’s also run back as a concept because people don’t pay to watch movies anymore. The internet superpowers of whistle blowing and freedom have led to entertainment having the cash value ripped out of it by force, a dizzying prospect for the way we rate things that won’t be fully rationalized until someone figures out a way to entirely monetize the internet in 2013 and it’s back to torment as usual. You didn’t put anything into watching Machete save time, but karma will forgive you because Robert Rodriguez forgot to try as well, and he was making the damn thing. Piss-dribbling scripting, grunty acting and a rambling nonsensical narrative are all fun parts of the B-movie tradition: Robert De Niro and a bizarre fascination with Mexican border politics aren’t. The boredom-sponsored border patrol segments make up the good eighty percent of movie that isn’t a Danny Trejo’s stab-party, whilst De Niro makes his 85^th shambling, dead-eyed cash-grab run-through of the century, further dashing his credentials against some jagged rocks until he comes to resemble Ben Kingsley, the walking phone. These bits are terrible, and not in an enjoyable way. The parts where Jessica Alba showers and Danny Trejo eliminates every sentient creature living in the year 2010 are terribly incredible; exactly what you didn’t pay any money to see. It’s just a shame that Robert Rodriguez seems to have corkscrewed this knowledge out of his talent.