Machete

Action, Camp
3 stars
Gratuitously violent and I laughed my butt off but I’m not sure that was the film’s intent. The grizzled title character, Danny Trejo, is a one man killing machine as he wields his namesake weapon of choice and body parts go flying in every direction (I may very possibly be a sick individual, but those scenes in particular were hilarious to me). There are a handful of tragic murders, but mostly it’s pretty funny. For the men, all the females are scantily clad, many of them completely naked including Jessica Alba and Lindsay Lohan. Lohan’s nude scene was hysterical! Robert De Niro stars as a twisted Senator who spends his downtime at the border shooting Mexicans. Jeff Fahey (“Lost”) co-stars as a sleaze ball. Michelle Rodriguez plays a badass local, Cheech Marin has a small role as a Padre, Don Johnson as a local redneck cop and Steven Seagal plays a Mexican drug lord whose death scene (c’mon, he’s a baddie, how do you think he ends up?) is probably the phoniest, most laughable death scene I have ever witnessed. I laughed A LOT. Included are all the bad clichés, like bouncing cars with flames painted on the sides and the Mexicans all fighting with garden tools; politically incorrect for sure, but the film does portray the Mexicans as the good guys. Very violent and funny.