Machete cuts everything but his hair

The beautiful thing about Robert Rodriguez is that he’s figured out how pointless it is to grow up. “Machete” is the kind of entrails-and-bone-chips film one might storyboard with markers in a treehouse with one’s fellow chock-faced hee-haw hormonals. Markers, yes, and we might need a few extra red ones.

It may sound like I’m about to give this movie a bad review. But in truth, it was a love letter to suppressed inner pubescents everywhere, and it was much appreciated by the seventh grader who lives in me, shouldering all my dirty jokes to the surface. And it was also a love letter to a genre that Mr. Rodriguez obviously adores. “Planet Terror” was the first such love letter, but ended up as more of a spoof than an homage to the grindhouse style. “Machete” strikes a better balance.

But who is this…”Machete”? Well, you know that Hispanic guy in all those Hispanic movies who plays the giant, leather-faced, ostensibly evil enforcer? That’s him. Danny Trejo. Blossoming into a leading man and putting up a Bond-worthy sexual tally despite his face looking like it’s been rototilled. His character, as any self-respecting teenage-boy fantasy would have it, is a loner, a military-trained hero whose family has been murdered by this dirtbag trafficker Torres (hilariously, Stephen Seagal). He tends to choose his machete knife over guns when it comes to killing bad guys, but he will kill with whatever, if there is no machete around. That’s how committed he is to killing people.

Attempting to mind his own business doing roofing and septic work, Machete is selected to be framed in a political stunt to turn the people of Texas against Mexican immigrants and get a hard-liner on the issue elected. This stunt sets off a series of borderline-insane events during which Machete and his friends have to kill and maim hundreds of people. That’s just how these things go. After all is said and done, the evil men will find that they have, as is plainly spelled out for them in Machete’s first text message to anyone, “fucked with the wrong Mexican.”

The movie is almost worth seeing for the casting. Aside from Mr. Seagall’s high-comedy turn as the ex-Federale Mexican drug lord, Robert DeNiro plays an evil immigrant-shooting Texan gubernatorial candidate, Don Johnson plays “Von Johnson,” a vigilante border policeman, Cheech Marin plays Machete’s hermano who’s gone into the priesthood but retains his impressive artillery, and Lindsay Lohan plays the wayward & rarely clothed daughter of the governor’s right-hand man. Score one for the team.

[On a side note, I’m disappointed Cheech and Don Johnson didn’t interact in some kind of special Nash Bridges reunion moment. But my heart may not have been able to take it.]

While this movie won’t be getting any five-star reviews for its Intelligent Commentary on the Arizona Situation, it may at least do the favor of bringing the issue back into the American consciousness, from which it seems to have fallen ever since the Lakers knocked the Suns out of the playoffs. No, this movie is more about a different kind of Freedom–the one that allows a writer/director to have his hero swing, by another man’s unfurled large intestine, from one story of a hospital to another. It’s the freedom of the movies, and this Mexican knows more about that than you.

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