As a director, Robert Rodriguez has always been in the business of making comedies, even if he’s only interested in making himself laugh. His Machete series is dumb exploitation parody, but it’s also in service of a higher calling for Rodriguez—he’s trying to turn Danny Trejo’s Machete into a folk hero for a community that’s highly underrepresented in mass media. Machete, if you haven’t seen the trailer in Grindhouse or the first film in the Machete series, is an unkillable man of few words who slaughters everyone who crosses him. Machete often strikes on behalf of the undocumented workers, the landscapers who Mitt Romney can’t have working on his lawn, for Pete’s sake, the waiters and cooks who are treated like wallpaper by the wealthy just because of the color of their skin. Giving them an action hero of their very own is a valuable service, even if the movies aspire to nothing much more than gory pulp.
There are moments in Machete Kills that are as weirdly funny as the comedies of an in-his-prime David Zucker. Machete’s inventive ways of killing faceless goons get more and more elaborate, until there’s no way to interpret them as anything but parody. The plot never takes itself seriously, which is often a blessing. Rodriguez surrounds the mostly silent Trejo with a bunch of actors who seem excited to say lines at him like “you know Mexico. Hell, you are Mexico,” and “consider this the Swiss Army Knife of machetes, Machete,” and “motherfucker, I’m not asking. I’m the President of the United States!” There are goofy-looking missiles aimed at Washington DC and a luchador-mask-wearing man wielding a sci-fi ray gun and split-personality drug lords with bombs wired to their heartbeats and a bunch of scantily clad prostitutes (led by a scenery-chewing Sofía Vergara) who are armed like a small army and desperate for Machete’s head. Cuba Gooding Jr and Lady Gaga show up for a few entertaining minutes, because why not?
But this is a movie with no self-control, and so a bad decision rears its ugly head every few minutes. A scene goes on for too long, say, or an homage falls flat. Or Mel Gibson shows up for a significant part. Don’t get me wrong; I’m usually okay with setting aside an actor’s real-life exploits for the sake of a film. Charlie Sheen (billed as Carlos Estevez) stars in Machete Kills as President Rathcock, and I thoroughly enjoyed his scenes, especially because they felt like bizarro twists on his dad’s role in The West Wing. But Mel Gibson these days is so obviously a creep that he sucks a lot of the life out of the third act. He looks creepy, he delivers lines like he’s aiming for self-awareness and failing, and it’s just painful to watch him in a way that pulls you out of the fun. With his hambone delivery and his zany wardrobe, I just kept wondering, wasn’t William Shatner available for this part? Shatner might be an asshole, but he’s not a monster.
Machete Kills has a lot more problems than just Gibson. The movie doesn’t really end, and it telegraphs its non-ending in the very first reel. Trejo beats one of the best lines in the first film—”Machete don’t text“—to death with repetition. Rodriguez needs more discipline, and that’s a shame, because the moments in Machete Kills where he’s indulging his sense of humor, or trying to build Machete into a cinematic icon, are pretty damn fun.