Review – Machete Kills

Robert Rodriguez is a ‘pulp’ director in the true sense of the word and will gladly churn out rubbishy fun for it’s own sake. The Machete franchise began as a trailer in Rodriguez’s Grindhouse collaboration with Quentin Tarantino, but soon after developed its own feature. The Grindhouse tradition and the Machete franchise continues with this latest instalment, Machete Kills. The original feature, Machete, stuck itself firmly in the action genre, where the plot is a loose charade tying gratuitous nudity and violence together. The sequel more resembles a Hollywood blockbuster – screenwriter Kyle Ward fine-tunes Rodriguez’s saga to riff on a wider variety of genres. The breasts and violence are toned down to accommodate a more outrageous storyline and new characters that push this sequel closer to comedy than its predecessor.

No Stefani Germanotta billing, alas.

To explain the plot simply, Machete (Danny Trejo) has to stop a Mexican revolutionary (Demián Bichir) from destroying the US with a nuclear missile, while various stakeholders pursue Machete, seeking to assassinate him. Lindsay Lohan‘s character may not have made it into the sequel, but popular train wrecks Mel Gibson and Carlos Estevez (aka Charlie Sheen) proudly represent here. This is a ridiculous movie built upon mountains of clichés, and it might not be everybody’s cup of tea, but the production’s unashamed of this and it’s a riot of fun. Mad Max is an evil billionaire, Charlie Sheen is the president, and Sofia Vergara and Lady Gaga are scantily clad psychopaths. If there had to be something wrong with this movie, it’d be the amount of sequel-baiting going on. Although if, as promised, it involves sending Machete to outer space, then it’s probably worth sitting through more of this franchise

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BO1WwOQowlg&w=400]