The latest movie by Robert Rodriguez, one of the indy directors who inspired me to go into film. This movie has a weird origin. It started as a mock trailer in the middle of GRINDHOUSE, an experiment to hark back to the drive-in double feature days with one film by Quintan Tarantino (Death Proof) and one movie by Rodriguez (Planet Terror). Between the two were a couple trailers for movies that didn't exist, but RR had so much fun with his that he decided to make it a feature length film starring Danny Trejo, Jessica Alba, Michelle Rodriguez, Cheech Marin, Robert Deniro, Lindsay Lohan, Don Johnson, Jeff Fahey and a bunch more.
The story: Machete is an ex-Mexican policeman who was betrayed and now lives in Texas. Then a man enlists him to kill a senator who is vowing to crackdown on illegal immigrants, however just before he is supposed to kill the senator Machete finds an assassin ready to kill him. The senator is shot, but not killed, and now Machete is on the run trying to untangle the conspiracy while being pursued by the police and FBI.
Was it good? Not really. The story is okay and Rodriguez intentionally made it over-the-top with a lot of the excesses of classic exploitation films (ie violence and nudity). But the story feels very disjointed. On one hand, you have some classic action movie elements (the man betrayed, a backdrop of political conspiracies), but then you have a lot of ridiculous moments. Part of this might be what RR is going for -- he has said that the film is meant to be a fun, exploitation film and not a serious political story. The thing is that in those classic exploitation movies those filmmakers were trying to make the best film they could. Sure, a lot of them were bad for various reasons (like they didn't spend a huge amount of time on the script), but you always got the sense that whatever their flaws the people were trying to do their best. Here, a lot of the movie feels half-a**ed, like RR is just on set to have fun and not give a damn. The reason that classic 70's movies had the political messages though was because those filmmakers were hired to make cheap action/horror, but they wanted to say something and then worked their a## off to say it in the context of those movies. Here, the political stuff could have been pulled because RR just doesn't seem to care about it, which makes that whole part of the film feel fake.
It's disappointing. I'm a huge Rodriguez fan, and I think for his 10-minute film school segments on his dvd's alone he deserves awards, but more and more he seems less interested in actually being a storyteller than in just goofing around. It's what you would expect of a director who was just in it to get laid. And I could respect that. But Rodriguez is capable of doing more. Spielberg took his love of sci-fi and used it to tell powerful stories. There's no reason to think RR couldn't do the same with the exploitation movies. After all, that's what Tarantino has done.
*** SLIGHT WATCH (if you want a silly exploitation flick, otherwise AVOID)
No comments:
Post a Comment