Friday, October 11, 2013

"Machete Kills" (2013)

Boy when Director Robert "Spy Kids" Rodriguez goes crazy, it is not a pretty sight by any means. He has of course no-one to blame but himself, because it has been Rodriguez particular conjuring power to bring together offbeat casting decisions (Cuba Gooding Jr, Lady GaGa, Charlie Sheen?? I'm all in!!)and use them in new and interesting ways. Hell he took a ferocious looking ex-Jailbird named Danny Trejo and turned him into an action movie star at the tender age of sixty eight years old!!! Now how do you wreck all the good will sown in the first Machete picture? Simple.... You rip off your plot from "Moonraker" the 1979 007 movie and then festoon the resulting script with as many leaden Star Wars references as is humanly possible...oh and spoiler, the damn thing is a cliffhanger as well!!! Bad movies that waste superlative casts cannot afford indulgences like that, George Lucas can get away with it, but only once and even then just barely. Trejo's "Machete" is a sort of Mexican Mike Hammer, incorruptible, violent and utterly righteous, he cleans up this foul world from the streets up. You DON'T lob that character into orbit and set him against a Dr. Evil" style supervillain even if that antagonist is played by Mel Gibson. It ought to be an Axiom of American Cinema that you cannot ripoff the single worst James Bond movie ever made and expect a good result. But there you have it, Rodriguez goes and wrecks a potentially lucrative franchise, sad to say, I'm thinking he has gone over the hump ne'er to return. Danny Trejo though seems to have plenty of snap left in his garters lets hope he can find a project worth of his brutal charisma. Oh and one last thing, doesn't ANYONE make a ninety minute motion picture anymore?? Everybody has their hearts set on these goddamn two-hour-plus-trailers super epics! If your premise is thin to begin with, it defies the known laws of physics to think it won't simply implode at one hundred and twenty interminable minutes! And one last point, the very 1970's exploitation films Rodriguez is so very ineptly homaging & or parodying were ALL produced by schlockmeisters who at least had the common sense not to belabor their subject matter with excessive running times. Trust me, the best drive in movies of that era, none of them were longer than ninety minutes....pay heed Robert, turn back, oh man.

2 comments:

massmarrier said...

Lackaday. At last thanks for the warning. I suppose I'll wait for Comcast to pick it up. The trailers made it look like such fun.

Zolok said...

Yeah huge disappointment...what can I say?



Z