Few films this year offer genuinely funny riffs on cinematic tropes except “Machete Kills,”
Director Robert Rodriguez’s follow-up to the proudly icky and violent “Machete.”
In this sequel, the film starts off with a fake trailer of “Machete Kills Again in Space,” where
Machete (Danny Trejo) dons a spacesuit and kills people with hilarious Star Wars-like laser
guns. Right off the bat, this signals the film’s embrace of pop culture references, which is
sprinkled generously throughout the film.
After that fake trailer, we open as Machete and Sartana (Jessica Alba, “Little Fockers”) raid an
illegal weapons sale by U.S. military men to Mexican cartels. When a third party comes and
interrupts the exchange, Sartana is left dead while Machete is tasked by U.S. President
Rathcock (Charlie Sheen, “Two and a Half Men,” credited as Carlos Estevez) to kill Mexican
revolutionary-terrorist Mendez (Demian Bichir, “The Bridge”). Machete unwillingly complies and
is sent to meet his handler Miss San Antonio (Amber Heard, “Drive Angry”) before heading back
to Mexico.
When he meets Mendez face-to-face, his plans to kill him are thwarted by the fact that
Mendez’s heart is connected to a button that will launch a missile directly aimed at the
president. His only hope of avoiding this is to bring Mendez across the border to meet the
original creator of the bomb, Luther Voz (Mel Gibson, “Edge of Darkness”). Cue the gross-out
violence and inappropriate humor.
Similar to the previous film and most of Rodriguez’s filmography, “Machete Kills” contains so
many cheesy one-liners, grotesque violence and terrible sexual politics that the audience will be
left offended if the film was meant to be taken seriously.
In fact, the only time the film sags is when it takes itself too seriously. “Machete Kills”
empathically comes out as anti-U.S. in regards to illegal immigration, often blaming the U.S.
government for the cartel violence in Mexico and the casual racism that Americans sometimes
spew.
In one instance, Gibson can be heard saying degrading commentary about the need for
Mexican laborers in their space mission. If that is meant to be ironic, it unfortunately doesn’t
come across that way because the film portrays every American as singularly oppressive and
unsympathetic to the Mexicans’ plights.
Nevertheless, there is plenty of good fun in this film to sustain the momentum it built. Trejo is as
comically inert as the titular no-nonsense character as he was in the previous film. The problem
is, with each successive sequel, his deadpan seems to suffer from diminishing returns. The rest of the actors seem to have good time playing cartoonish characters, especially Mel Gibson and
Demian Bichir, who give new meaning to the word over-the-top.
