Earlier this week North by Northwestern had the opportunity to talk with Robert Rodriguez and Alexa Vega about the Machete mythos and it’s latest installment, Machete Kills. Originally conceived by Rodriguez in 1995, Danny Trejo’s Machete is a former Federale turned macheting-weilding killer after his family is murdered by an evil drug lord.
Fast-forward to today, Machete now has two movies and two fake movie trailers under his belt. The latest, the aforementioned and aptly-named Machete Kills, was released this weekend and marks what by all accounts appears to be the final installment in the series. Then again, Rodriguez never intended to make one feature-length Machete movie, let alone two, so at this point we're living in a world where literally anything is possible.
So how did Rodriguez go about making a sequel to his beloved Mexploitation Grindhouse trailer? He compares the first Machete to First Blood, saying, “One of the influences of this was the Rambo series. In First Blood, he didn’t want to be the badass; they made him be the badass. It was kind of a tight little thing. In Rambo: First Blood Part II, then he was working for the government, saving a bunch of hostages. I wanted Machete Kills to feel like that kind of a step up.”
Machete Kills certainly does deliver in this respect: more star cameos, more action, more weapons, more “Machete don’t ______” one-liners. This time around, Machete is recruited by the President, who is played by Charlie Sheen.
Machete travels to Mexico to stop an insane revolutionary hell-bent on destroying Washington D.C. Along the way he meets a host of characters, including Vega’s ruthless Killjoy, and discovers the threat is much larger than initially suspected.
Vega, probably better known for her work with Rodriguez on the Spy Kids series, says she has been longing to get out of childhood roles. With Machete Kills and several other movies coming out later this year, she seems to have succeeded. “I basically begged and fought for this role, and I knew that once I walked on set if I wasn’t 100 percent confident, [Rodriguez] would’ve sent me packing," Vega says. "I couldn’t show any hesitation."
There is a palpable enthusiasm to almost every performance in Machete Kills, one which does exude a confidence that can at times be very entertaining. However, it also points to one of the larger problems with Machete Kills that prevents it from being the all-our thrill ride it was always meant to be. The irony of the title of the hypothetical third film in the series, Machete Kills Again, is that it very much describes the second film. Were there actually a third film, it could be more appropriately titled Machete Kills Again: A Second (Third) Time. And this points to the inescapable fact that Machete Kills is a second movie based off a joke made back in 2007, so it’s hard to ignore the fact that it feels a little stale.
Rodriguez addressed the possibility of the series getting old, saying, “You could take the movie and just go darker and harder, and just deliver the same kind of movie as the first one. But I really wanted to surprise people. You want to keep it as odd as possible.” To do so,Rodriguez said he found himself particularly influenced by Evil Dead 2. But Machete Kills is a far cry from Evil Dead 2, a film which reinvented the entire Evil Dead mythos by starting from scratch and focusing on previously unseen aspects of its protagonist. Machete Kills certainly escalates, but it never redefines. The joke becomes more ridiculous, but maybe it is still, at heart, the same joke.
This is most obvious in Machete himself, who remains stoic, capable and dry – shelling out multiple reworked iterations of the classic “Machete don’t text” line from part one. Even if the action surprises us, the character never does. Often the action doesn’t surprise either.
That said, there is still something very encouraging about Machete Kills. It, along with almost all of Rodriguez’s work stands as proof that it is possible to make a big, epic film on a very small budget (in the case of Machete Kills, a mere $20 million). Rodriguez is accustomed to working on the fringe of Hollywood, and he openly encourages others to forget what they know about how films should be produced, saying, “Not knowing is the most important of the battle. A lot of it you can figure out and reinvent. There’s no way one of doing things. I’m always eager to try new ways of doing things. I try not to get too much in a rut.”