Remember when there used to be tons of action stars? I mean, there still are, but there are no longer tons of young action stars. Really all you’ve got is Jason Statham and The Rock.[1][2] Anyway, the next one has Jason Statham, so necessarily Faster has The Rock. And while I think he’s really quite a good actor, most of the awesomeness in this movie happened when he wasn’t speaking at all. But I’m ahead of myself. What you should ought to know is that said Rock has just been released from prison and is on a mission of revenge against the people who murdered his brother right before he went to prison. And, man, what a mission. His first victim is felled within maybe an hour of his release, which I “spoil” only to make it clear (as the previews did identically before me) that this is a movie that is not fucking around.

Everything from there forward is a race between our anti-hero, an assassin hired by one of his impending victims, and a broken down cop at the end of his career, to see which of the three missions will be completed first. The Rock really is the star of the show, and not just because the script dictates it. The first shot shows him pacing across his tiny prison cell, waiting for the moment of release, and it’s easy to believe that, like a shark in a goldfish bowl, he’s been pacing those same steps all ten years. And after release, he never really seems to stop moving, not to emote, hardly ever even to speak, and that’s what I meant earlier. The only really deep theme of the movie is that (again, like a shark) motion equals life, and any time spent away from that, the character is diminished.

It’s a spare movie with almost monomaniacal focus, but what it is doing, it does very well. It’s not that important or anything, but it’s quite good. My only real complaint is with the assassin character, and it’s a weird one. He was over-developed, which of course you want character development, right? But he’s really an outsider to the plot, and to the extent that you care about the plot, every scene that delves into his backstory is fingernail-on-chalkboard levels of out of place. As a foil to The Rock’s non-stop brutality, his careful planning and finesse would work really well. As an alternative main character, and that really is the amount of development he receives, it feels like he wandered into the wrong movie by mistake. Which is too bad, as either movie might have been decent (though I’m sure this one was the better of the two options); but both of them suffer by being crammed together like this.

[1] Vin Diesel kinda disappeared; I can only assume he is in the middle of a really excellent D&D campaign and will rejoin us by 2012.
[2] Shia LaBeouf? Seriously? I can end you, you know.

I don’t even know where to begin. All I can tell you is that from the moment Machete started until the credits rolled (complete with promised sequels!), I had a grin on my face the size of Texas. At one point, I believe I actually whooped at the screen. There is just not enough hyperbole in the world to express how much I loved this movie, and I know I’m going overboard with the praise already, like by a lot, but I can’t stop myself. It is really comparable in plot and character development to what 2012 did with set design and special effects. In fact, if 2012 had not existed, I would call this the most over-the-top movie I’d ever seen, and I still think the fact that it goes in other directions will make anyone who loved that movie love this one without having to feel like it’s ripping anything off.

Of course, Machete is ripping something off, and that something is an entire decade of drive-in cinema, picking and choosing plot points, recurring themes, and larger than life characters at will to create the ultimate expression of 1970s badassery. Oh, and it’s ripping off limbs and heads by the cart-load, but that probably goes without saying. I don’t think there’s a single character that Danny Trejo (in the eponymous role) doesn’t fight or fuck his way through on his rampage through a slightly surreal version of Austin to take out Steven Seagal’s conniving drug lord; it’s not clear that Machete knows any other way to interact with the populace at large. Robert Rodriguez has surpassed Planet Terror in every way, and all with a movie he fleshed out from a fake trailer, apparently because modern politics reminded him of the idea? I am grateful to you, crazy Arizonan lawmakers!

I kind of wish I was watching it again, right now.

You have likely seen various previews for The Expendables, the main selling point of which is that it contains 75% of the action stars from the past three decades. I mean, of the previews, not the movie. My point is that the previews did not actually try to sell the movie on any axis other than star power. And there is some extent to which I have to agree with this decision, because the script was only barely distinguishable from some of the early ’70s Marvel comics I’ve been reading lately; about the only significant differences are a) the lack of radiation-spawned superheroes and b) the concept of the tinpot island dictator having American backing; after all, we weren’t very cynical quite yet, as of 1971. Still, it was on the whole a pretty decent movie in which a lot of familiar people are involved in a wide variety of car chases, gun battles, and explosions, just as advertised. Don’t expect to have any significant memories about it the next day, though.

Despite this barely positive review, I feel compelled to make two more complaints beyond the genericism. Firstly, I found the title a little misleading as to the tone of the film. I’m not saying it’s shiny and happy and nothing bad happens as in some action flicks, but it really isn’t nearly as dark as it should be. And, I’m disappointed in Jason Statham’s romance subplot. After enough consideration to convince me into writing this paragraph in the first place, I think the problem is not merely that it was disconnected from the rest of the movie and therefore irrelevant. Rather, it’s that he was presented as a secondary main character after Stallone (who had plenty of character development moments with other strong side characters), yet this half-hearted attempt to develop Statham’s character hurts things more than if they had just let him be a sidekick. If neither he nor his plot had existed in the movie, it would have been the same movie. If both had existed without the rest of the film, they could have been the seeds of a completely different (and maybe stronger) alternate film. But crammed together, it made an otherwise generic movie with several interesting characters worse. And that is sad.