Forget the Politics: Jessica Alba Naked is Why People Will See Machete
In a move that just goes to show people will always over analyze the stupidest shit, reports are floating around that Robert Rodriguez’s Machete is being heralded by a select few political minds as liable to start a race war for the way it glorifies the struggle of the illegal immigrant over the oppressive white man who denies him paradise.
Maybe those guys saw a different movie than I did. Even the trailer establishes the movie as soft-core war porn. Soft-core war porn with Jessica Alba in it, that is:
Machete does have a message, but it doesn’t go a hell of a lot deeper than “can’t we all just get along?” There’s some political stuff there too. But that’s not really the point of this movie, which originated from a fake trailer Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino plastered in the middle of their 2007 double feature, Grindhouse. Machete (Danny Trejo) is a blade-slinging Mexican Federale who is double-crossed by both his own agency and then an American sleazebag (Jeff Fahey) who hires him to gun down a Texas state Senator (Robert De Niro). Along the way, much is made, at least jokingly, of a Mexican uprising, a mysterious leader named She (as in Che), and a taco vendor (Michelle Rodriguez) who may or may not be connected to both. But the selling point isn’t la revolution. It’s the blood, the guts and the considerable but still restrained nudity from Jessica Alba and Lindsay Lohan.
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Yes, this movie is my middle-school self’s dream come true. This moment made me hit puberty:
Sorry, I needed an excuse to watch that again.
At any rate, nothing in the trailers for Machete mentions the illegal immigrant’s struggle. There are plenty of severed heads and beautiful women, Cheech Marin toting shotguns and Lindsay Lohan in a nun’s habit.
I can’t imagine anyone rising up to bear arms with that image as their motivation, except maybe Perez Hiton or something.
If there was ever a case of people not getting the joke, I think this might be it. From the guts, to Jessica Alba naked, to the fact that Rodriguez, in an inspired stroke, released the movie on Labor Day weekend…well, everything here smacks of a big gag on an audience too serious to laugh along.
Machete is neither revolutionary nor serious enough to inspire a true revolution. It is fun, it is stupid, and it is definitely a must-see for anyone who enjoys Rodriguez’s various Mexploitation films (thank you, EW.com) or Tarantino and Eli Roth’s splatterfests. But any movie that casts Steven Seagal as the bad guy with a fake Mexican accent…I mean, let’s not kid ourselves, the only war this thing is waging is a battle against good taste.
Yes, it wins.
