Machete

Trashy actioner about a highly skilled former Mexican Federal turned renegade.  He’s hired by a shady businessman to assassinate a senator campaigning against illegal immigrants.  Unfortunately director Robert Rodriguez’s tribute to 70s exploitation films like Death Wish fails when it plays it conventionally straight.  This would have worked better as unadulterated parody, but it frequently succumbs to the flaws it’s trying to make fun of.  The beheadings, stabbings and bullets exploding through human flesh are unending.  If you can stomach all the bloodshed, the picture does have moments where it shows a sense of humor.  In one cartoonishly violent display, Machete stabs an attacker, reaches into his chest, grabs his small intensive and then uses it as a rope to swing down to the next floor.  That scene works because it’s ridiculously creative, but more often than not, its heavy-handed carnage is depressing.  It is in fact the  non plus ultra of violence.  Machete’s origins rest in a fake movie trailer that appeared in the box office failure Grindhouse.  It probably should have remained that way.  It was a lot funnier as a two-minute teaser.