Machete: Critic Reviews

See Machete for Trejo, who barely cracks a smile, or even an emotion, but makes grade-Z stoic invincibility cool again.

The pace is swift, the tone playful, the screenplay peppered with one-liners.

[A] tongue-in-cheek, knife-in-guts action thriller...

Rodriguez combines sharp satire and timely political commentary with a decidedly B-movie ethos.

It's a movie that just wants to have fun. To a large degree, it succeeds.

The movie's an unexpected end-of-summer tonic: a trash guilty pleasure with a healthy (if really violent) sense of outrage. It's also Rodriguez's freest movie yet, and possibly his best.

Because there's no real character drama or consistent critique grounding the spoof, when Machete isn't laugh-out-loud funny, it's deadly boring.

Now we have a full-length Machete movie, and it turns out that, as usual, less is more.

The whole thing is monumentally gruesome and just as monumentally cynical, a riot of grisly cliches designed to titillate and amuse.

A loud, giddy, carnal blast from one of cinema's most relentless schlock auteurs.

Rodriguez plans "Machete" sequels. Here's hoping the next is sharper and cuts closer to the bone.

"Machete" is gratuitously smutty, sadistically violent, politically aware and somehow also politically incorrect. Put more succinctly, it is awesome, and delivers every goofy gory guilty pleasure "The Expendables" was supposed to but did not.

The movie is ham-handed, repetitive, and rhythm-less -- a mess that's uglier than its hero and nowhere near as likable.

At 105 minutes, Machete is at least half an hour too long for its own good.

It's hard to think of another film this summer that offers such sheer anarchic fun.

It's absurd, absolutely insane and a lot of fun.

It's basically a one-joke exercise heading toward the inevitable big battle between vigilantes and Mexicans. There's lots of gore, flesh and fun along the way, but it gets repetitious.

When Machete yields a weed-whacker as a weapon, there is a subtle beauty to it.

Wildly uneven as it doggedly strives (sometimes with obvious strain) to sustain a free-wheeling, anything-goes air of exuberant junkiness.

[It] may be a weird combo of speechy and pulpy but it's also what another all-star bloodbath, The Expendables, should have been -- self-aware, flashy and fun.

It's a Hispanic American version of a blaxploitation film of the Super Fly school, with bloody action, titillating nudity and a catch-phrase riddled script.

There's a fine line between clever and stupid, as the Spinal Tap lads reminded us, and Machete grinds that line on a razor's edge.

Brimming with infectious energy -- a well-made movie in the style of poorly made movies.

Sorry, mis amigos, wrong decades. The modern B-movie would seem to be devoted to self-conscious fun. More laughs, but fewer real chills.

I have nothing against films that take political stances, but an exploitation flick? It's off-putting. I'd prefer to sit back and bask in the carnage and R-rated silliness.