MACHETE KILLS

I saw MACHETE KILLS last night! For those of you who are fans of exploitation films and midnight-movie wackiness you are in for a treat. Thats right, Robert Rodriguez is back at the helm of yet another grindhouse mexploitation flick starring everyone's favorite indestructible Mexican, Danny Trejo as the super bad-ass ex Federali, Machete! This time around Machete finds himself trying to foil a homicidal Cartel leader's plot to destroy Washington DC while battling killer hookers, a shape-shifting hitman and a mad scientist along the way. Now the last Machete movie suffered from a little thing I like to call TooMuchShitGoingOn-itos. It was clunky, it was confusing, there were 20 different characters, none of which got much of any screen time and 4 different plots going on all at the same time but in different directions. Fortunately, this time Robert Rodriguez has learned from his mistakes by trimming the plot, cutting the run time and jacking up the laughs and in the process managed to make one of the wackiest, cheesiest, most oddly cast and absurdly funny movies I have seen in a very long time. The story is easy to follow, the action is way over the top and the characters are plentiful but not overwhelming. The cast is really something to be talked about here because it includes some of the biggest names in Hollywood including Lady Gaga, Sofia Vergara, Jessica Alba, Cuba Gooding Jr, Edward James Olmos, Vanessa Hudgens, Mel Gibson, who just reminds us of why we loved him in the first place, and over a dozen other recognizable names and faces. The more Rodriguez films you've seen, the more you'll enjoy this movie. If I have any gripes about the movie it would be that there are some really big plot holes in this film and even some scenes that just feel completely left out. I'm not sure if they are on purpose or on accident but more than one time I found myself saying "wait...what? What happened?" That aside, if you're a fan of movies like Crank or Black Dynamite, or Austin Powers or any of the old school exploitation films of the 70's run and check this out! One word of caution, make sure to find somebody to be your DD when you go to this movie because the more inebriated you are when you go to see this, the better time you'll have. Machete Kills gets a 4...out of 5.