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88The 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.
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80Designed and destined to win no awards, Machete is expert, cartoon-violent, lighthearted fun. Just the thing to send Junior back to school in a good mood.
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78In the end, Machete may not be all that original, but it is fresh – fresh as a steel blade to the gut.
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75Forget modulation, nuance or storytelling, this is a movie that hits hard from first to last, no questions asked or logic followed.
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A maniacal, over-the-top, daring, and insanely funny satire of the American cultus from Hollywood to Madison Avenue to Pennsylvania Avenue, Machete has all the nutrition a growing film geek could possibly need.
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75Danny Trejo plays the long-haired, craggy-faced titular Machete with a combination of swift ferocity and baleful kindliness. And the ladies love it.
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75Moviegoers will know in the first five minutes whether the new B-movie Machete is their cup of tea - or bucket of blood.
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75A gory, pulpy wink of an action thriller, was spun out of a parody trailer Rodriguez directed for the '70s-trash homage "Grindhouse" (2007). The trailer was sublime. As a feature, Machete is more fun than it isn't, but its deadpan mockery of exploitation clichés often slips a bit too close to being the real, schlocky thing.
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75What Machete does have -- and what saves it from itself -- is comic bloodthirst, shameless vulgarity and the determination of Rodriguez and Maniquis to wink at their audience at every moment.
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72Machete works because at no time does it ever ask the audience to take any of this too seriously, yet the nudges and winks are never so forceful that it feels like it's begging for your laughter.
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70The ensemble cast -- ranging from an Oscar winner (De Niro) and faded action star (Seagal) to a B-movie vet (Fahey) and tabloid fodder (Lindsay Lohan, not exactly playing against type as a drugged-out, hell-raising sexpot) -- pretty much offers something for everybody.
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70Machete is insanely violent, insanely over-the-top. It's pretty much flat-out insane.
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70How often can you see Cheech Marin nailed to a cross or Lindsay Lohan in a threesome with Trejo and the actress playing her mother?
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70For all its political button pushing, Machete is too preposterous to qualify as satire. The only viewers it is likely to upset are the same kind of people who once claimed that the purple Tinky Winky in "Teletubbies" promoted a gay agenda.
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63This unholy mess replaces the artful ambition of "The American" with torture, blood spray, kinky sex, twisted fun and a bizarro critique of U.S. policy on illegal immigration.
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63Any movie that finds a plausible reason to give Lindsay Lohan a nun's habit and a machine gun is worth your attention.
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63Despite broad satire about racism and border fences that will appeal to some liberals, the movie doesn't line up neatly along party lines -- except in that other sense of the word "party." It's a movie that just wants to have fun.
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63Director Robert Rodriguez understands the exploitation genre and delivers everything one craves from it - over-the-top, graphic violence; scenery-chewing villains; cheesy one-liners; and plenty of naked boobs and bums.
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63Like those '70s movies it borrows from, there's a blast of tongue-in-cheek politics built around a "They messed with the WRONG Mexican" message. No, this may not go over in Arizona.
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60This is the kind of movie in which it's considered the zenith of meta-wit to have a slumming Robert De Niro (as Machete's racist politico nemesis) drive a taxi.
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58It's often stylish and exciting, but the pile-up of cool kills, hot bodies, and other unprocessed bits of juvenilia doesn't add up to a good time.
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50It's outlandishly gory and bluntly political, the latter being more interesting than the former. It wears out its welcome, though, long before la revolucion and sequels are promised.
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50Machete is exactly what you expect. There's ridiculously over-the-top violence, plenty of nudity, and lots of grisly humor. It's mostly enjoyable, but isn't likely to be anyone's top 5 anything.
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50Machete is a drinking man's "The Expendables."
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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.
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50Wildly uneven as it doggedly strives (sometimes with obvious strain) to sustain a free-wheeling, anything-goes air of exuberant junkiness.
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40So now we have a full-length Machete movie, and it turns out that, as usual, less is more.
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30Rodriguez retreats into gruesome violence and flaccid comedy, grasping feebly for topical relevance by referencing the current immigration fracas.
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25The whole thing is monumentally gruesome and just as monumentally cynical, a riot of grisly cliches designed to titillate and amuse.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 41 out of 66
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Mixed: 8 out of 66
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Negative: 17 out of 66
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