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If there are really umpteen million aliens in the U.S., look for Machete to rake in mucho dinero this weekend.
Taken unironically (if that's possible), Robert Rodriguez's insanely violent spin-off of a fake movie trailer in his Grindhouse collaboration with Quentin Tarantino is a hilariously unsubtle call for undocumented Chicanos to invoke the Second Amendment rights they'd have if they were citizens and start their own gun-toting Tea Party.
(There's even a mysterious leader named She, whose posters use a font almost identical to the "Che" posters of radical chic days.)
That's the extent of politics we'll talk here. I'll leave the rest to conservative pundits, who've been trying to start a fight over Rodriguez's latest over-the-top exercise.
Taken on its own terms, Machete is a hilarious and transgressively violent second act in Rodriguez's Grindhouse fixation -- odes to the '70s exploitation films that he grew up on. There are even artificial scratches on the screen during the credits and a quasi-porn soundtrack.
Whether there is an appetite for such things is debatable. Despite critical acclaim, Grindhouse didn't do well. People seem to prefer their slasher films and torture porn to be free of winks and humour.
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But who knows? Maybe it's just a matter of getting the cheese-to-exploitation right. And in Machete, Rodriguez delivers an outrageous killing machine whose imagination knows no bounds. The vengeful former Federale named Machete prefers his eponymous blade, but in a pinch will use surgical supplies and even disable armed men with a Weedwhacker. (A bullet to his head turns out to be non-fatal because it bounces off a previously-imbedded bullet.) Many heads are severed in Machete. There is a crucifixion. After some awkwardly-inserted trivia dialogue about the length of a human intestine, we discover the unintended usefulness of such a thing in a gun-battle.
All this, plus Cheech Marin as a gun-toting priest, Steven Seagal as a Mexican druglord and a rolling army of low-riders in the last act.
And Machete (Danny Trejo, the lovable Mexican-American bad-guy actor whose face is so lived-in, it makes Keith Richards look like Justin Bieber) is, of course, catnip to the ladies. His romantic interests include a Chicana revolutionary (Michelle Rodriguez), an immigration cop (Jessica Alba) and a politico's spoiled daughter, played by Lindsay Lohan, who is seen variously on meth or naked (and that was just between takes ... bad-um-bum).
At issue is an aw-shucks Texas senator (Robert De Niro), whose entire campaign is devoted to keeping Mexicans out (in his spare time, he duck-shoots them at the border with the small army of anti-immigrant vigilantes he's helped foment). Working as a day labourer, Machete is approached by a sneaky political strategist (Jeff Fahey) to assassinate the senator, and then is set up.
Thus is chili con carnage set in motion. Or as Machete himself texts (when he learns how to do so): "You just f---ed with the wrong Mexican." That was actually the tagline for the trailer in Grindhouse, but it just wasn't acceptable to major media outlets.
Still, it sums up Machete pretty well.
(This film is rated 18A)
jim.slotek@sunmedia.ca