Machete (2010) review

Former Mexican cop Machete (Danny Trejo), in exile in the U.S., gets commissioned to assassinate a racist Senator (Robert De Niro, collecting yet another paycheck), gets to make love to various women (including hot mess Lindsay Lohan), gets to join Michelle Rodriguez in an armed revolt against American renegades and gets to fight a saber duel with Steven Seagal ... but Machete still doesn't get a good script to work with. Normally, you cut the trailer from the finished movie, not the other way around: what worked in a two-minute trailer for the Rodriguez/Tarantino omnibus Grindhouse - which was quite funny - takes itself too seriously here as it tries to make some ham-fisted point about illegal immigration and U.S. politics. Rodriguez has always been more of a stylist than a screenwriter, and this looks too polished and stern to pass as mock-exploitation (and if you're going to go for gore, this needed to be far sillier). For a filmmaker, trying to coax a convincing performance out of the superficially lovely but sadly talentless Jessica Alba is a truly impossible mission: the girl belongs in magazine ads for shampoo.