Machete (2010)
★★½ — Machete (2010)
There are films that arrive with a full explanation of themselves baked in, and Machete is one of them. The whole project began life as a fake trailer, one of the spoof adverts Rodriguez produced for the 2007 double-bill release Planet Terror, and the audience response was enthusiastic enough that expanding it to feature length started to make a kind of mad commercial sense. By 2010, what had been two minutes of gleeful carnage had become a 105-minute film, co-directed by Rodriguez and his editor Ethan Maniquis, and produced through Rodriguez's own Troublemaker Studios alongside Overnight Films, with additional involvement from German and British co-producers. The premise is about as streamlined as action cinema gets: a former Mexican federal agent, double-crossed and left for dead after a botched assassination job, works his way back up the food chain looking for payback. That is the entire architecture. Rodriguez has always been drawn to this kind of stripped-back pulp storytelling, and anyone who has followed his career through films like From Dusk Till Dawn or Once Upon a Time in Mexico will have a reasonable sense of what they are walking into here. The film wears its grindhouse influences loudly and without apology, complete with artificial grain, scratched-film effects, and a general aesthetic that is designed to evoke the cheaply produced exploitation pictures of the 1970s, while being made with rather more technical resource than those films ever had.
The casting is, by any conventional measure, absurd, and that is clearly the point. Danny Trejo, a character actor who had spent decades doing sterling work in supporting roles across a run of genre pictures, gets handed the lead, and the film is essentially built around the particular quality he brings: a weathered, impassive physicality that manages to be both deadpan and genuinely threatening. Around him, Rodriguez assembled a roster that reads less like a call sheet and more like a dare. Jessica Alba plays a federal agent, Michelle Rodriguez runs a taco van that is rather more than it appears, and Robert De Niro turns up as a corrupt Texas senator apparently thoroughly unbothered by the company he is keeping. Steven Seagal, in a role that functions as its own kind of commentary on a certain era of action cinema, plays the villain. It is a polished but unremarkable production in purely technical terms, though the sheer concentration of recognisable faces gives the whole thing an energy that a more anonymous cast simply could not have provided. Rodriguez, for his part, is doing what he has done since El Mariachi: making films fast, loud, and on his own terms, with a cheerful disregard for the kind of restraint that more cautious filmmakers tend to exercise.
Machete is exactly what it promises to be: a blood-soaked, over-the-top, grindhouse-style action flick with zero interest in subtlety or realism. Danny Trejo is perfectly cast as the stone-faced, axe-wielding ex-Federale out for revenge, and the cast is stacked. Jessica Alba, Michelle Rodriguez, Steven Seagal, Lindsay Lohan, Cheech Marin, even Robert De Niro showing up like he’s having the time of his life. It’s chaotic, loud, and packed with ridiculous kills, exploding cars, and lines so dumb they loop back to being cool (“Machete don’t text!”). The whole thing’s a satire of exploitation films, but played so straight that it’s hard to tell if it’s mocking the genre or just loving it too much to change. And honestly? That’s part of the fun. If you’re in the mood to switch off and enjoy some gloriously stupid action, this delivers in spades. The practical effects are great, the energy never dips, and Robert Rodriguez leans hard into the B-movie vibe with grindhouse cuts, and grainy filters. But for all its style and star power, it’s just… average. Nothing about it feels special or fresh, even for a film that isn’t trying to be. It’s entertaining while it lasts, but the plot’s paper-thin, the jokes wear thin fast, and it doesn’t have the heart or edge of his earlier work like El Mariachi. Fine for a lazy Sunday, but forgettable the second the credits roll. Turn your brain off. Just don’t expect it to leave a mark.
For me, that tension Rodriguez sets up between loving the genre and poking fun at it is what keeps Machete just interesting enough to sit through, even if it never quite commits to being either a genuine tribute or a sharp satire. It is the sort of film I find easier to enjoy in the moment than to recommend afterwards. If you are after something with a bit more propulsion and a cleaner sense of what it wants to do with its action, my reviews of Mad Max: Fury Road and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga might give you a better evening. Machete is not bad. It is just not quite enough.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2010 | Watched: 2025-09-08
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Machete (2010) on YouTube
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from Robert Rodriguez: Planet Terror (2007) · From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) · Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003) · El Mariachi (1992)
More from Germany: Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Cemetery Man (1994) · The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) · Resident Evil: Retribution (2012)
More from the 2010s: Wonder (2017) · Beautiful Boy (2018) · The Witch (2015) · What We Do in the Shadows (2014)
More action: A Better Tomorrow (1986) · The General (1926) · Hand of Death (1976) · Daredevil (2003)
More comedy: The Eagle (1925) · The General (1926) · Americana (2023) · The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)
