After having his family killed Machete (Danny Trejo) migrates to Texas and starts to do odd jobs like every other illegal immigrant.  One day he’s picked up by Michael Booth (Jeff Fahey) and asked to assassinate Senator John McLaughlin (Robert De Niro).  Assuming that this can’t go wrong, he accepts the job.  He’s double crossed and now he’s being targeted by every law enforcement agency in the state and at the same time badass enough not to get caught.

This is a film that I’ve been looking forward to since 2007 when the Grindhouse double feature was released in theatres and Robert Rodriguez was continually going on about how he had shot so much of the Machete film already just so he could cut the faux trailer, which was why he was going to be getting the rest of the film made.  Well three years later we finally get to see the film that Rodriguez had conceived as a bad joke on exploitation taken to the max.  The only problem I have with that idea is that he did it already with the (then) fake trailer.

The film is just moving from point to point where Trejo’s character, Machete, is kicking ass.  However, it never feels as slick and well strung together as other films like this, including Planet Terror, are.  At times the film feels nothing more than someone playing out a string of action sequences that only work with the idea that Machete is cool.

What I did like about this movie were certain off characters including: Robert De Niro as the anti-immigrant Texan Senator, Don Johnson as Von Jackson (the Mexican hating border patrolman) and Steven Segal as Torrez (the Mexican drug lord who has his hands in everything and murdered Machete’s family in the prologue of the film).  My problem with all these likes is that there all in the wrong places.  All of these characters are pretty much minor roles when in comparison to all the Mexican roles which are what dominate the time on screen.  Now I’m not trying to say bad things about Mexican’s on film, it’s just that I had so much fun with the other characters.  Characters like Luz (Michelle Rodriguez) and Padre (Cheech Marin) just felt like they didn’t do anything other than enable the film to be twenty minutes longer.

Some of the things, like the fact that Machete gets with every woman in the movie, are things that I would be laughing at to the point of pains in my sides, but here it feels slightly useless.  What I will give this movie is that it did fill my ridiculous action quota for the day.  I took an unscheduled break away from ridiculous action films after watching The Expendables a couple weeks back, and this movie reminded me how much I enjoy completely over the top action to the point of not caring that it made no sense.  The movie even went to the point where he used a guy’s intestines as a rope to swing down a level of a building.

The movie is a complete over the top film that those of you who didn’t even bother to read this review and just went and watched the film without caring about how good/bad it is anyways.

IMDB says 7.5/10

Rotten Tomatoes says 74%

I say 6.5/10