"That's not a knife...oh, wait....yes it is. It's lots of knives."
Within the first 5 minutes of Robert Rodriguez’ Machete all taste, decency and logic has been completely abandoned in favour of madness, cartoonish ultra-violence and a woman hiding a mobile phone up her twat. The opening scenes are so brilliantly in-yo-face that it’s like driving past a not just a car crash, but a pile-up of clown cars and vans full of fireworks. Picture this: we open on a dusty Mexican highway with our hero Machete (Danny Trejo – a man SO HARD I think his moustache could whip me at arm wrestling on its own) and his reluctant Federalé partner disobeying direct orders and speeding toward a drug lord’s hideout to save a kidnapped girl. The partner doesn’t last very long of course. He is almost instantly rubbed out by bad-guy gunfire leaving Machete to humbly apologise to a corpse (“.…lo siento….”). He then proceeds to cut off a man’s arm and use it to shoot yet more baddies. Then he cuts off a bloke’s head and for good measure cuts the head in half (I believe this is commonly known as a ‘belt & braces’ approach). More decapitations then follow and a couple of skewerings - blood is exploding all over the stereotyped Mexican mise-en-scene as Machete finally finds the ridiculously beautiful and completely naked girl and attempts to haul her out to safety. She tries to coax him into bed first of course, but he shuns her advances so she stabs him in the thigh. Our bollock naked damsel in distress then pulls the aforementioned phone out of her lady-pocket and we learn of Machete’s double crossing.
