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40Turns out there can be too much of a good thing. Or a campy thing. Or a silly thing. Or a subtle-as-a-brick-in-the-face thing.
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40It works extremely well as a drunken, date-night midnighter or film-fest entry, all madcap bloodletting and surrealist non sequiturs.
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50Rodriguez does a fair job of keeping the zaniness coming: Vergara’s machine gun bra, Gibson delivering exposition in a “Star Wars” prop, bad guys offed by helicopter blades in dementedly creative ways. It’s enough that you’ll hope Rodriguez makes good on that new faux trailer — for “Machete Kills Again . . . in Space.”
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50The harder everyone tries to wring laughs out of the next hail of bullets or the next ridiculous plot twist or the next comedic decapitation, the duller the edge of the humor.
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40Violent, silly, embarrassing, clumsy, confusing, juvenile, occasionally offensive, occasionally a little bit fun.
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83Machete Kills is gruesomely baroque trash staged with a kinetic freedom that is truly eye-popping, so you can forgive its lapses, like how it goes on a little too long. Rodriguez's only real sin as a filmmaker is that he wants to give you way too much of a crazy ultraviolent good time.
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64More focused and less preachy than its exploitation-riffing predecessor, the comparably shoddy Machete Kills nonetheless peters out in the homestretch (and, for some, surely sooner).
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30Machete Kills winds up a slightly camp, tinny parody of bad action movies, playing out with the same sense of tedium as a genuine bad action movie.
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50Robert Rodriguez is like that friend who loves to tell jokes, but always goes on and on, well past the punch line. Remember how he beat the living daylights out of his “Spy Kids” franchise? That’s what he’s working toward with Machete.
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20Machete Kills? “Machete Bores” is more like it.
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20The carnage (with its computer-generated splatter) is meant to be campy fun, but it’s so offhand that there’s less suspense than in an Austin Powers movie.
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50Entertainingly gruesome in parts, and not without a certain anarchic wit, it’s the kind of movie you pause to watch when it’s on TV, but after half an hour, you’ll click over to something else.
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45At times, to be blunt, he (Trejo) comes off like a silent film star who's accidentally lumbered onto the set of a bloody, violent, thoroughly ridiculous talkie: reluctant to speak, sometimes a little confused by his surroundings.
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50Those who love Robert Rodriguez's over-the-top Grindhouse-flavored spoofs will delight in this one but, ultimately, this is probably one Machete too many.
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50The picture is assembled with energy and a smidgen of style, but it's tiresome and slight.
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50As much as Machete Kills is a reunion and continued revival, it also represents a sort of gentrification of the exploitation genre. It's probably time to move on and let a new generation of kids take a crack at making bad films.
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50The films that Robert Rodriguez emulates here are known for similar unexpected narrative turns, but the crucial value that he misses is their actual cheapness.
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25When a celebrity chef like Rodriguez is just going through the motions, we can smell that the grindhouse fad is way past its expiration date. It's time to put a fork in it.
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Oct 9, 201375Machete Kills is gleefully ridiculous, one-upping the first movie’s jokes, blood, and even its massively heightened self-awareness. No matter how Rodriguez would like to pitch it, Machete Kills isn’t really an homage to exploitation movies as much as it’s a parody of them.
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40As a focused spoof of exploitation tropes, Machete Kills is, frankly, terrible. But as a surreal stream of subconsciousness from a filmmaker who’s spent a lifetime watching bad movies, it’s an occasionally entertaining diversion.
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Oct 10, 201338It is all so intentionally ridiculous that it gets boring, and you just wait for the next big cornball revelation to momentarily jolt you awake, like Sofia Vergara strapping on her machine-gun bra, or Lady Gaga’s appearance as a hit woman. Machete kills, sure. Unfortunately, he overkills.
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Oct 11, 201340The odd vivid shot reminds you of Rodriguez's dynamic visual imagination, but also what it's wasted on here: a project as indifferent as some of the trash that inspired it.
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30The cinematic axiom of diminishing returns appears to be catching up with Robert Rodriguez’s Machete franchise in only the second installment, as the series’ engagingly lowbrow concept gets overwhelmed by episodic plotting and uninspired, rote performances.
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30All too soon, Machete Kills collapses into a deranged, directionless splatter comedy that exhausts its bag of tricks, many of them recycled from this grindhouse auteur’s 2010 spoof.
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83Like its predecessor, Machete Kills is never less than busy with ridiculousness.
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40Perhaps because the joke’s already spent, this sequel has a pretty low bar to clear, and manages to be both utterly meritless and weirdly bearable.
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40Sadly, much as we want to relish the shameless parade of cartoon violence, while indulging the equally shameless cavalcade of adolescent sexism, the soggy plotting and slack comic timing are downers.
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80You’re really going for Rodriguez’s retrohappy splatter: Intestines tangle in helicopter rotors, heads pop in spring-loaded decapitations, and there’s even a new fake trailer up top. Little is believable, and that’s exactly as it should be.
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Oct 7, 201340Like a meal made entirely of chillies, Machete Mk II is spicy to start with, then unpleasant, then numbing - before it all starts to repeat.
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50Machete Kills dulls more than anything. It's not that Robert Rodriguez's sequel lacks any of the camp or exploitative violence of the 2010 original. The mayhem has just become boring.
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40As violent as its predecessor yet noticeably duller and less outrageous, Machete Kills is dragged to the finish line entirely by its director’s madcap energy and an absurd cast of major stars in strange cameos.
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70Kills tops the 2010 original by not giving a mierda about logic or character.
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37It’s exhausting. It’s also not particularly funny or engaging.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 4 out of 7
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Mixed: 2 out of 7
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Negative: 1 out of 7
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Oct 11, 20139
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Oct 11, 201310
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Oct 13, 20138