A live-action cartoon of intensely artificial violence, postmodern racial caricature, and whatever wave of feminism encompasses being an asskicking matriarch as well as a hot piece of T&A screencandy, Machete is so ridiculously fun that it’d be easy to miss reading it as one of this year’s most subversively political films. Co-director/writer Robert Rodriguez has reportedly had an idea for a Mexican action movie gestating for much of his career, but it’s hard to imagine a film that’s more au courant. Or rather (since, as they say, this is America, not France), corriente — a word that in Mexico means both “of the moment” and “cheap or trashy.” Machete is both, smartly capturing America’s current election-season fervor over immigration in all its complexity, while denying us none of the simple, dumb pleasures of blood, boobs, and horrible one-liners.
Machete Cortez (Danny Trejo) is a taciturn Mexican federal cop who, in the film’s pre-opening-credits segment, loses his partner and gets gored by his own machete (although not before he gets at least a half dozen kills out of it, including an amazing quadruple beheading) by a naked woman he thought he was rescuing from drug lords. She pulls a communication device out of her vag and calls in Machete’s arch-nemesis, the drug lord Torrez (Steven Seagal), who reveals he, duh, owns the police before beheading Machete’s wife and, in an all-too-common mistake for villains, leaving him to die in a burning building.
After the opening credits and a few years pass, we, along with Machete, are in present-day Texas. He’s new in town, trying without much luck to get an honest day’s work like scores of other undocumented day laborers. So, he doesn’t complain when he’s picked up by a rich-looking guy in a nice black car, presumably to do septic work. The man, Michael Booth (Jeff Fahey), doesn’t want him to empty pipes, but the barrel of a gun, into senate incumbent John McLaughlin (Robert DeNiro), who’s running a reelection campaign on an anti-immigration platform. Booth explains how his own interests and those of undocumented immigrants weirdly coincide: McLaughlin needs to die because the state’s economy would be crippled without the endless supply of cheap labor Mexican immigrants provide. Machete doesn’t want to get involved, but Booth forces him into the job.
It would be a good enough approximation of the cynical tug-o-war that politics can play with people, but Rodriguez and Maniquis have even bigger things in mind. As it turns out (muchos spoiler alerts in this paragraph!), Booth was lying. Not only is he Senator McLaughlin’s aide, but he’s also a drug lord himself who answers to Machete’s nemesis Torrez. McLaughlin’s reelection, guaranteed by the heroism of surviving an assassination attempt, would mean tighter border restrictions for everyone except Torrez, who could then control the US drug market, sharing the profits with Booth. It’s a contrived plot, to be sure, but watching it unravel is as fun as watching Machete unravel an opponent’s intestines and use them as rope for rappelling. And just as functional, at least if you’re dangling political metaphors instead of muscle-bound Mexican heroes. McLaughlin may be manipulating white America’s xenophobia for his own political gain, but like them, he’s a puppet of forces of capital that owe allegiance to no country.
Thus, it’s class war, not race, that Machete is really concerned with. Its cast of good guys are mostly of Mexican descent, but they’re all working class: dishwashers, day laborers, and taco truck owners. Even Yvetta Sartana (Jessica Alba), the border-control agent who eventually takes Machete’s side, had to start out as a janitor and work her way up. It even seems like Machete and the security guards of Hungarian descent, who he has to fight to get into Booth’s mansion, have a grudging respect for one another — he doesn’t even kill them.
Machete’s concern for the lower two classes means that its preoccupation with “cheap” entertainment is seamless with its message, and to the credit of directors Robert Rodriguez and Ethan Maniquis, it pulls off its teatro popular without being the least bit condescending. Besides, precisely by working within, and even embracing, the dumbed-down conventions of mainstream movie crap, Rodriguez and Maniquis have created a pro-immigrant argument that’s so deeply entrenched in mainstream Americana that even a Teabagger couldn’t cry “socialist.”
Yet in every review I’ve read, class consciousness has been ignored. Maybe the film’s postmodern and decidedly un-PC celebration of Mexican American (or just “Mexican,” to use the film’s, and the Southwest’s, vernacular) culture is just too dazzlingly distracting. And really, there’s nothing wrong with that. The Tea Party isn’t based on logical argument, but rather irrational fear and hate. What better antidote than making Mexican culture cool and completely accessible?
That’s where Machete really kicks ass, anyway. Every line is seasoned with border state Mexican slang, and every scene is stuffed like a chile relleno with cultural references: Mexican wrestling masks, tacos, helados carts, sweet lowriders, Catholicism, marijuana, cholos in high socks with shorts, and cholas with pompadours and painted-on eyebrows wearing suspenders and wifebeaters. And, of course, there’s the film’s dual Latinas: the previously mentioned Yvetta Sartana and Luz (Michelle Rodriguez), who runs a modern-day underground railroad for immigrants called The Network while operating a taco truck for her day job. Besides Machete himself, these two have the most cojones of any characters in the film. Luz even comes back after being shot in the eye, wearing a black eyepatch that matches her brassiere and big-ass gun. It might be post-feminist, since they’re also wearing gratuitously revealing outfits, but it’s an interesting variation on the stereotypical combination of Mexican matriarchy and machismo.
After watching Machete, I felt pretty proud that I grew up in a majority-Latino city in southern California. I wouldn’t be surprised if many people left feeling the same way or at least envious if they hadn’t. But, Machete is big-hearted and inclusive enough that they shouldn’t worry about missing out — like Julio (Daryl Sabara), an adopted cholo so white that Jonah Hill was originally cast for his role, we can all be Mexican, if we want.