"Machete Kills" A Bloody Mess

Robert Rodriguez’s raunchy and blood-soaked "Machete" franchise has grown up a lot from its birth as a one-off trailer made for Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s gore-fest "Grindhouse." "Machete Kills" is a two-hour jaunt through a violent funhouse that, while just as insane and twisted as it markets itself to be, often ends up as much a mess as the vigilante Machete’s trail of destruction. "Machete Kills" is an entertaining movie when it manages to be self-aware and engages with the audience; however, the movie is more often sloppy and taxing than funny or compelling.

As anyone would expect from the title, "Machete Kills" promises egregious amounts of violence, and it fully delivers on those vows. Machete and the other characters in the film tear and shoot their way through foes in ways that are equally horrifying and ridiculous. The moments are always cruel and unusual, but the ideas are recycled enough to make each successive action scene less interesting than the last—Machete (Danny Trejo) uses a helicopter to eviscerate someone several times throughout the film.

In moments of extreme violence and dialogue, the camera work focuses on what’s important—Rodriguez does not shy away from explicit close-ups of the goriest scenes. However, during the interceding scenes, Rodriguez still insists on inexplicably focusing on the characters’ feet far more than their bodies, which makes understanding what’s going on rather confusing. Even amid these alternately mediocre and chaotic shots, there are some inspired cinematographic choices. In the middle of the movie, a security monitor in the background gives the audience two simultaneous shots of a relatively unimportant death, creating a surprising subtle moment in a film that otherwise relies on garish spectacle to hold the audience’s interest.

The characters’ development throughout the film is similarly uneven. Along with the bloodbath, "Machete Kills" has all the mild sexism that one would expect from a movie franchise about a machete-wielding action hero: most women in the film seem to exist for the sole reason of getting shot and upsetting Machete, which, while not surprising, is regrettable. The dialogue in "Kills" relies on clichés and catchphrases, even awkwardly dropping the movie’s title in the middle of a pivotal scene. The things the characters say are predictable line by line—save for a few rare deviations. The dialogue in the movie is never in danger of feeling revolutionary, but when characters break from their unimaginative molds, it gives the movie some unexpected energy and drive. The main villains, rather than acting sinister, often indulge in silly antics that undermine the gravity of their scenes—one of the main villains, a gigantic "Star Wars" fan, gives Machete a tour of his facility in a carbon copy of Luke Skywalker’s landspeeder from "A New Hope."

The movie props up its C-list celebrities as a selling point, and all of them succeed at bringing humor to the film. Charlie Sheen, billed as Carlos Estévez, steals the film as the foul-mouthed U.S. President, executing his often-questionable lines with a vitalizing kick. The addition of Lady Gaga to the cast initially seems tacked on, but her (admittedly limited) lines are well executed and add to the experience of the film. While many of the secondary characters of "Machete Kills" are smash hits, Machete comes across as tired more than interesting. Trejo’s lines are often grunted more than they are spoken, which is particularly problematic when his lines are already borderline nonsensical. Furthermore, he often comes across as not fully engaged in what is occurring around him in the film. When it comes to many of the one-note characters, it’s unclear often whether Rodriguez wants them to be flat and uninteresting or they just don’t hit the mark. Whatever the intention, the guest stars end up as the driving force of the humor in the film, carrying the film rather than its lead or the plot.

The Achilles’ heel of a movie like "Machete Kills" is the imbalance of the comedic nature of the film with the serious themes that it broaches, apparent in the numerous racist jokes made at Machete’s expense. The fact that "Machete Kills" fails to balance these tones at all makes the movie a violent rollercoaster, complete with emotional whiplash. Whenever the movie tries to do something serious or emotionally significant, it is impossible to be sure whether to take the motivations and inner feelings of a character seriously or not, especially when it comes to the title character. Because of this, anything that isn’t violence and sassy banter (a category that is unfortunately broad) is annoying and exhausting to sit through. The movie also uses prolonged gags to try keep the humor from dragging, but they often end up producing the opposite effect—they’re often far too repetitive or inexplicable to keep interest. One villain’s car incessantly recites a spanish-to-english dictionary in each of its appearances, which becomes unbearable after the fourth or fifth time.

The reality is that "Machete Kills" starts out as the grisly and ludicrous sequel for which everyone was hoping, but it peters out and dies before it manages to bring anything good to the table.