Going to Mexico, Machete, a young courageous and smart warrior, who has been assigned by the United States government to track down an evil arms dealer in Mexico, who plans for a new war in America, the thing that challenges him.
"Machete will return in: Machete Kills!" boomed the gritty voiceover dude at the end of Robert Rodriguez's 2010 Mexploitation parody. Three years later, we're reminded that it was a threat, not a promise.
The stunt casting is so poorly realized that actors pop in and out of the film at random, the story apparently stitched together according to actors' schedules.
When a celebrity chef like Rodriguez is just going through the motions, we can smell that the grindhouse fad is way past its expiration date. It's time to put a fork in it.
Maybe... 'neo-grindhouse' has become a 'genre' because Tarantino's Midas touch turned grindhouse into ... art? Grindhouse sort of sounds like 'art house.' On the other hand-nah.
Machete Kills is a film in which style sardonically routs substance, a cloying gag built around the iconic quality of Trejo's matchlessly craggy face, which resembles a plate of sundried corned beef.
