"Machete don't text."

"Machete"

Robert Rodriguez's Machete could easily qualify as one of the most prefabricated pieces in cinema history. Based on a mock trailer which premiered as part of Grindhouse, the director's double-feature collaboration with Quentin Tarantino, and built from the ground up with pulp stylization, Machete exists to both execute the outrageous sequences filmed three years ago and continue the Grindhouse tradition which failed to launch after the film's DOA premiere.

The film stars stone-faced Danny Trejo as an ex-federale known only as Machete. The vigilante hero's tenacious disregard for Mexican gang hierarchy leads to the murder of his wife and daughter at the hands of a ruthless drug lord named Torrez (Steven Seagal). Years later, Machete is working as a day laborer in Texas and gets setup by Booth (Jeff Fahey), the campaign manager for anti-immigration Senator McLaughlin (Robert De Niro). Booth proposes that Machete execute the Senator to ensure the state a steady stream of cheap illegal labor. In actuality, he has intentions to use the attack to paint McLaughlin's racist tirades in a sympathetic light. That McLaughlin has ties to Torrez only furthers Machete on his path toward revenge. His avenging brand of justice gets helped along by an underground immigration leader (Michelle Rodriguez), an evolving ICE agent (Jessica Alba), and his brother, the Padre (Cheech Marin). Lindsay Lohan also stars as a spoiled drug addicted brat who appears alternately nude and in a nun's habit, for good measure.

In truth, Machete lacks the kick of nonsense fun which made Rodriguez's Planet Terror the better of the two Grindhouse features. While that film was whimsical in its gruesome despair, this one can be quite mean and unwinking in tone. It's a darker film and less witty in the way it executes scenes of violence. Nonetheless, Rodriguez's homage exercise does pay off as a "you wanted it, you go it" picture which integrates the indelible trailer moments into a bigger story with only occasional lag. It also features some beautifully hammy performances by a cast of interesting middle-tier, non-A-list talent (excepting De Niro, a very famous ham indeed). Trejo has been so menacing so often and so successfully without ever being asked to carry a feature, as he does so wonderfully here. Alba has never been made to do so much in a film, even though she is not entirely removed from being the token sexpot. Michelle Rodriguez does her best work here since Girlfight as a perfectly tenacious freedom fighter who transforms into a powerhouse action heroine. Hers is probably the closest to the arc Rose McGowan's Cherry so magnificently executed in Planet Terror and is easily one of the best things about this wildly uneven splatter-fest.

Ivan smiles.