Robert Rodriguez’s film delivers imaginative action

Witnessing the great character actor Danny Trejo in a leading role is worth enduring the blood-soaked mayhem of Robert Rodriguez’s politically charged carnival ride, Machete. For the past two decades of Hollywood filmmaking, the actor’s chapped, leathery mug has lurked behind every bar counter and amid every heist team. With the occasional growl or mutter slipping out like a wisp of gunsmoke, Machete arrives with an air of prophecy.

Rodriguez’s picture also arrives just in time to give Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer a few more white hairs and similarly ruffle proponents of Arizona’s new immigration law.

An adaptation of the director’s own fake trailer from splatter-throwback Grindhouse — by far the most incendiary thing to be found within those three hours of manufactured schlock — Machete begins with a botched raid at the desert lair of drug lord Torrez (Steven Seagal, in his best role to date). The driver, an ex-federale known as Machete (Trejo), ignores his whining partner and rams the compound with their police cruiser (the whining partner is thus riddled with bullets). The ill-fated hit ends with many severed body parts and the tragic murder of the title character’s wife, courtesy of Torrez.

Three years later and north of the border without a green card, the newly homeless Machete gets by on day labor. He is propositioned by a slippery senatorial aide (Jeff Fahey) to assassinate Sen. John McLaughlin (Robert De Niro), a Texan xenophobe who shoots illegal immigrants for sport when the cameras aren’t rolling. Of course, the assassination attempt is a stunt orchestrated by McLaughlin to gain votes. This is how Rodriguez ensures the title hero a full hour’s worth of ludicrously violent revenge that would leave directors Russ Meyer and John Waters flushed with elation. Welcome to the resurrected world of Mexploitation cinema.

In some ways, the director’s attempts to channel 1970s trash cinema has always been a doomed dream, if an endearing one. A scantily clad Pam Grier blowing apart a drug baron’s head like a watermelon might have been countercultural during the Jimmy Carter years. However, anyone who witnessed Alejandre Aja’s recent flesh-fest, Piranha 3-D, would be hard pressed to argue that a severed penis and innumerable flapping bosoms belonged in a 42nd Street theater and not at the Beverly Center multiplex.

Still, what Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino failed to achieve with two features, Rodriguez finally accomplishes here, with verve and alacrity. The superficial traditions remain intact: Machete jumps from Washington, D.C. to El Paso, Texas with no explanation of how he got there. At another point, the character wakes up, rips a life support tube from his chest and snatches his weapon upon news that henchmen are coming, leading to the film’s best sight gag: Machete escaping out the back window using a bad guy’s intestines.

The tasteless jokes work this time because they toy with popular expectations. Photographing excess is easy, but catching an audience off guard with its presentation remains a challenge. What better moves are there than to cast De Niro as the corrupt senator, Cheech Marin as a shotgun-wielding priest who aids Machete or Don Johnson as a border vigilante that dreams of seeing Trejo “dance the Bolero at the end of a rope?”

Indeed, everything about Machete, from its violence to its cast, seems borrowed from the imagination of a 15-year-old boy, and therefore, its realization is a wonder to behold. The only apparent compromise between this nostalgic origin and the box office is the presence of Jessica Alba as an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent. And yet, Rodriguez redeems her character with a speech so lame and applause so disproportionately thunderous that we are inclined to overlook the misstep in the interest of an uproarious laugh.

Although on paper there is much in Machete to be upset about, it is difficult to imagine being truly offended by what sights and sounds Rodriguez has to offer, given the movie’s overwhelmingly earnest nature.

There is not an ounce of mean-spirited energy to found in the film. Although its detractors, especially those who support deportations, will argue that the film enables racism against white Americans (a claim that should be taken with a grain of salt and a shot of Patrón), the merriment of watching Rodriguez’s dream brought to life by his band of actors renders Machete the most unabashedly enjoyable film of the year and a perfect finale for the summer.