When it was first announced Robert Rodriguez would make a movie based on his fake trailer Machete, my fear was that it would be a one-joke movie. When it ended up as the same kind of genius trash as the movie it was birthed from, I was ecstatic. So imagine my disappointment when its sequel falls into the trap the first one avoided.
Make no mistake: Machete Kills is still hilarious and absurdly violent. But it's a series of diminishing returns for its overlong 107 minutes. Any character introduced will only repeat his or her traits for the rest of the movie. Amber Heard will be a vapid beauty queen who can fight; Sofia Vergara will fire weapons from her breasts, and Charlie Sheen will be Charlie Sheen.
In the first film, the line that killed the most was "Machete don't text." It worked because it was a brief, hilarious summation of this Mexican Chuck Norris. In Machete Kills, Trejo repeats some variation of this throughout the movie. Part of what made Machete a great character was him being a man of few words. Here, he's a man of the same few words.
But that makes for a prime opportunity for plenty of scene-stealers. Demian Bichir, who just wrapped a great season of work on FX's The Bridge, plays a schizophrenic ex-cartel bruiser threatening to blow up Washington with the detonator wired to his heart. Bichir has proven he can break your heart, and this role proves he can make you laugh.
Even better is Mel Gibson as the film's big bad. He strikes the right balance of menacing and ridiculous. It would be nice to see him have a legitimate comeback, even though the wound of his real life sins still feels fresh. In the film, he makes references to "the incident" and his past films, most graphically The Man Without a Face. It's a great bit of winking, even if the film has a surplus of it already.
Machete Kills could have been a lean and mean sequel, but it's filled with far too many repetitive scenes. One more car chase, one more gun to Machete's head, one more over-the-top decapitation. Yet even in its bloated state, it's still an entertaining grindhouse flick.
