Machete

Venice (Out of Competition) – This year's Venice Film Festival begins for Paul Martin pretty much where FrightFest left off, as Danny Trejo and an all-star cast extend Robert Rodriguez' spoof Grindhouse trailer into a flesh-rending feature.

For a film that Scott Pilgrim'd at the American box office on its 2007 release, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez' Grindhouse has sure demonstrated some durability. The main attraction might have been a commercial disappointment, but the spoof trailers featured within have had their makers practically frothing at the mouth in eagerness to stretch them out to feature duration. Eli Roth is supposedly keen to give just such treatment to his teaser for slasher spoof Thanksgiving, while a full-length version of Hobo with a Shotgun will be with us next year, starring Rutger Hauer as the firearm-toting tatterdemalion.

But emerging quickest from the burning wreckage of Grindhouse is Rodriguez' own Machete, which in a turn of events that can either be viewed as demonstration of how tiny the movie world truly is when you get down to the nuts and bolts of it or alternatively as one of those freaky cosmic coincidences that if not quite offering evidence of some overseeing demiurge then certainly prompts you to consider again your embargo on playing the lottery, is one of the first films being screened at the 2010 edition of the Venice Film Festival – the jury president for that event being none other than RR's old mucker, Quentin Tarantino.

An homage to the kind of gritty revenge tales that were once dominated by the merciless moustache of Charles Bronson, Machete finds Rodriguez' long-time collaborator Danny Trejo taking on the title role. When we first meet Machete, he is a lawman in Mexico, a federale, who plays by his own rules and shuns the straitjacket of authority. However, after being double-crossed and left for dead during a pre-credits mission to bust katana-wielding drugs baron, Torrez (two words for you, people - Steven Seagal. I know!), Trejo's tough guy washes up in Texas, struggling to make ends meet as a labourer.

Spied by Martin Booth (Jeff Fahey), effortlessly winning a street fight while simultaneously chowing down on a fajita, Machete is offered $150,000 to assassinate Senator John McLaughlin (Robert De Niro, mugging and gurning like he's angling for an engagement in panto this December), who is campaigning for re-election on an aggressive anti-immigration platform. But our boy turns out to be the fall guy in another set-up, forcing him to go on the run, and rely on help from the tough, taco-selling Luz (Michelle Rodriguez) and sympathetic customs cop, Sartana Rivera (Jessica Alba), in order to find out just who is at the head of the conspiracy in which he has become embroiled.

His face as craggy and lined as the Grand Canyon, his voice as raspy as a snake that's just puffed its way through a full pack of B&H – you would think Danny Trejo would be the perfect fit for this action hero assignment as an unkillable instrument of vengeance. Yet while he brings his characteristic toughness to this rare outing as a leading man – Sartana, when she first lays eyes on him, refers to his “'don't fuck with me, I won't fuck with you' attitude” - Trejo does not always convince as a relentless engine of destruction. When called upon to work his legs in the wide shots, he falls some way short of a breathless sprint, instead managing more of a bow-legged shuffle, akin to Terry Wogan ambling down the Blankety Blank steps ahead of greeting this week's contestants, or a pensioner jogging for a bus when his pockets are sagging under the weight of fistfuls of piddling small change.

Of the extensive supporting cast, Jeff Fahey, Michelle Rodriguez and Cheech Marin fare the best, all injecting attitude into their parts while maintaining a healthy sense of the whole endeavour's inherent ridiculousness. Jessica Alba is typically bland, while Lindsay Lohan is - almost cruelly it feels - cast as a character none too far removed from her tabloid persona; a narcotics-hoovering screwed-up rich girl, eking out a living as an internet porn star. Redemption does eventually arrive for her, as it will hopefully do for Lohan is real life. Action titan Seagal plays Torrez, who, as the name suggests, is Mexican and yes, a south of the border twang does colour those familiar soft-spoken tones. At least when Seagal remembers to deploy this vocal modification, which is a sizeable distance short of 100 percent of the time. Indeed the Under Siege star is possibly the least convincing screen Mexican since Ringo Starr in Candy. And in a movie bursting with sneering heels, Don Johnson's redneck vigilante, dudded up like a weird cross between Van Morrison and Robert Duvall's Colonel Kilgore from Apocalypse Now, is the loser, both in terms of screen time and memorable contributions to the action.

Machete ultimately falls between several stools, there being not enough jokes for it to be considered a full-blown lampoon in the Black Dynamite vein, the action being neither gory or spectacular enough to really get excited about. Genuinely inventive episodes (an intestinal escape line, a head-severing clothesline sweep) are outnumbered twenty to one by pedestrian gunfights, while the retro aspects, such as scratches on the film, have not only all been seen before, but seen before in prior output by Rodriguez himself.

Rating on a scale of 5 cans of Steven Seagal's Lightning Bolt: 2

Release date: US = 3 September; UK = 26 November
Directed by: Robert Rodriguez, Ethan Maniquis
Screenplay by: Robert Rodriguez, Álvaro Rodriguez
Cast: Danny Trejo, Jessica Alba, Robert De Niro, Jeff Fahey
Cert: US = R; UK = TBC
Running Time: 105 minutes

Machete trailer comes via IGN.

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