Most film critics have come to a similar conclusion about Robert Rodriguez’s new film, “Machete.” With few exceptions, the movie has been received as a directorially accomplished and modestly enjoyable comic-book revenge fantasy — easy to look at, easy to laugh at, and easy to forget. There is, of course, a contemporary twist. Critics also invariably note the ultraviolent operetta’s cartoonish pro-immigrant politics, in which virtuous Mexican day laborers struggle against and defeat villainous drug lords and murderous Anglo border vigilantes.
More gore-ality than morality tale, the film essentially does for the border what Rodriguez’s friend Quentin Tarantino did for the Third Reich in “Inglourious Basterds.” Which is to say, he turns it into a vehicle for guts-splattered slapstick mixed with fact and fancy, heavy on the fancy. It is an argument for comprehensive immigration reform by way of Tromaville. A film in which a man swings down the side of a building using another man’s intestines as a rope, as Danny Trejo’s title character does, is not taking itself very seriously. Nor, say critics, should it invite audiences to do so. “The only viewers [“Machete”] is likely to upset are the same kind of people who once claimed that the purple Tinky Winky in ‘Teletubbies’ promoted a gay agenda,” wrote Stephen Holder of The New York Times. Or, as “Machete” costar Michelle Rodriguez told Cinematical, “It’s a freaking exploitation film. If anybody tries to take [it] seriously, [as a] political statement, I would laugh at them.”
Rodriguez has been laughing for over a week now, because since the film’s release on Sept. 3, some usual suspects have concluded that Tinky Winky is now part of the Aztlan plot. For the more outraged conservative critics of “Machete,” the spectacle of America’s first Latino action hero laying waste to cartoon rednecks the way John Rambo once laid waste to cartoon commies is too much to bear. For them, “Machete” is a harbinger of race war, if not the geographical disintegration of the country itself. “The Reconquista is here—at a theater near you,” wrote FoxNews.com contributor James Pinkerton, referring a nativist conspiracy theory about Mexico plotting to “reconquer” the American Southwest that is also known as the Plan de Aztlan. Richard Spencer, a former American Conservative editor who now edits AlternativeRight.com, sniffed that the movie was “a catalogue of depraved and predictably left-wing outrages” whose only message is “Kill Whitey! Kill Whitey! Kill Whitey!”
That Jones could find an “anti-gun” message in “Machete” illustrates the degree to which his paranoia is the driving force shaping his increasingly popular worldview. Despite the film’s taste for machetes and gardening tools used as weapons, there is no shortage of good old-fashioned gun porn. The title character, to pick just one example, enters the final scene flying slow-mo through the air on a motorcycle topped with a high-caliber machine gun.
Only when Trejo lands do the machetes come out. It is this battle royal that follows, in the campy climax of “Machete,” that most angers the film’s conservative critics. It is not hard to see why. It is the most provocative pro-immigrant set piece since the gleeful mass border-run orchestrated by Cheech Marin at the end of the 1987 comedy “Born in East L.A.” (Marin appears in “Machete” as a pot-smoking priest.) For 15 minutes, “Machete” indulges in no-holds barred undocumented catharsis in broad daylight: Mexican day laborers confronting and disemboweling the Anglo border vigilantes that once hunted them in the desert for sport. The Mexicans win handily and raise their machetes in victory.
Those who sympathize with the work done by border groups like the Minutemen will naturally not be pleased with this. Ditto the film’s depiction of border-activists not as concerned law-abiding patriots, but as cold-blooded racist killers. “Welcome to America,” says Don Johnson’s vigilante sheriff character, modeled partly on Arizona’s Joe Arpaio, after shooting a pregnant Mexican in the desert.
But however unfair to law-abiding border-watchers “Machete” may be, it is no call for race war. Neither marauding Mexicans nor white gangs spend the film hunting down random members of their opposite number in back streets and alleyways. The violence centers on the border and its related drug trade; the two sides clearly represent not races, but competing if caricatured visions of immigration policy. Nor are the use of stereotypes anything new, especially in the action and exploitation genres. Flip the script of “Machete,” and you have any number of television shows and films from recent decades in which white heroes like Chuck Norris and Sylvester Stallone mow down faceless Asian, black and Latino gangsters, commies and terrorists. Nor are these films ancient history. In the opening scene of this year’s action throwback “The Expendables,” a gang of evil Africans is shredded by a white-majority band of heroes in the very first scene. And let’s not even get into the silence with which the conservative figures quoted above greeted the depiction of Jews in Mel Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ,” a film completely lacking in the hipster tongue-in-cheek self-awareness with which “Machete” drips.
Despite the heated cries of outraged conservatives, Robert Rodriguez has not done anything all that interesting, new or threatening in his latest film. He has merely pulled some old Hollywood conventions inside out for a new era. Hard though it may be for some to accept, “Machete” is a quintessentially American twenty-first century night at the movies—a “Revenge of the Nerd Gardeners” with border vigilantes as the college jocks. For those who can take this for what it is, the result is nothing more than a couple of hours of mindless fun. For everyone else, “Red Dawn” can usually be found somewhere on cable.
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