Machete

Machete is a pretty good companion to The Expendables, another bloody ensemble action film that came out in the late summer of last year. It's a little more low budget and skews a bit differently with its cast, featuring more well-known women than men and a bunch of character actors. They both have their strengths and weaknesses, and I hesitate to declare one or the other the truly superior film, but they're both mostly enjoyable, hilariously violent movies.

The movie stars the instantly-recognizable Danny Trejo as Machete, a Mexican federal who gets betrayed, crosses the border, and gets betrayed again, when he decides to finally fight back against all those who have wronged him. It's a pretty extensive list, including Jeff Fahey as a slimy businessman and Steven Seagal as a slimy ex-federal. Robert De Niro plays a slimy politician with a fake Texan accent, in one of the more obvious jabs in a movie full of easy commentary on the whole immigration issue. I didn't bother trying to really understand what the movie was trying to say, because it was clear from the beginning that the real purpose of Machete was to be a silly Mexploitation film, and the politics are just there so a bunch of Mexican people can make speeches and then fight a bunch of white people. Basically, our economy needs cheap illegal labor to run, and if you try to totally get rid of it, bad things will happen. In real life, people would lose money; in the movie, they might get shot or blown up.

But anyway Machete joins an underground criminal network in an attempt to get back at the many villains the film quickly introduces. To sum it up simply, much like Once Upon a Time In Mexico, the plot is kind of an overstuffed mess. There are too many characters who don't have enough to do and the movie doesn't take enough time to make them all worth the effort. Luckily, unlike Mexico, Machete mostly makes up for it by generally acknowledging its own silliness and letting the fun come from a bunch of silly one-liners and especially absurdly gory and occasionally honestly clever action scenes. There's also some pointless nudity and winking celebrity cameos, this movie did come out of the whole Grindhouse project after all. Rodriguez has proven himself pretty consistent at making entertaining low-brow movies on the cheap, and he did the same thing again here. Things kind of peter out once you realize there's no way he's going to resolve everything in a unique and satisfactory way, but if you just let it be a stupid action movie with a lot of mediocre-to-good ideas, it's not bad.

Avatar

I was in a bit of a conundrum here. James Cameron was possibly the best action director in Hollywood for about a decade, but that decade ended fifteen years ago. The only film he made since then was one I very much did not care for, and I was very unsure about Avatar based on what I'd read and seen. I went into the theater hoping it would be awesome and expecting it to be mediocre, and it ended up being somewhere in the middle, which I probably could have foreseen.

Just to get this out of the way, yes, a disproportionate amount of the film's appeal hinges on the visuals. And they are mighty impressive, both from looking at the quality of the computer effects and the effectiveness of the 3D. I haven't seen any other movies with anything more sophisticated than the blue and red glasses, so I can't honestly say how good or bad it is by modern standards. I will say that it looked pretty awesome, though the film still would have looked very nice without it. What the 3D was attempting to do was further pull you into this world Cameron created from scratch, and for better or worse it mostly succeeded. It's not really hype to say that you mostly forget you're watching something that beyond a few pieces of set in the human encampments only exists at all digitally, and you're left to focus on the story. Whether you actually like that story is a different question. But the visuals avoided gimmickry with jumping out at you for the most part, and spent a lot of time just letting you enjoy looking at it. I feel like this will hold up a lot better with time than effects laden pictures from earlier last decade, but only time will tell if that's the case.

So to answer whether the film beyond the special effects worked for me, the answer is: sorta. It's not really a great original story beyond the setting. It is very competently constructed, though. The film makes perhaps too great an attempt to justify everything, answering a lot of questions I had about the basic premise. Important elements are introduced properly before coming back later. Despite what you may think about the long running time, and it did feel a good twenty minutes too long, there is very little that happens and doesn't serve a purpose. It's not the most elegant script Cameron's ever written, but I guess it didn't have to be with his budget, and for the most part it all fits together and works to some degree.

None of the characters will impress you with their originality or uniqueness, but they're generally likable or easy to hate where required. For some reason Sam Worthington seems to be in every big action movie now, and I thought he was fine if not too remarkable. He was much more expressive in his alien form than as a human, but I thought that worked - he's becoming increasingly detached from his original life, and his whole character is driving towards being one of the natives. People have made a lot of disparaging remarks regarding the whole noble savages thing, but I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with how it works here. The movie's fairly funny too, providing some really nerdy laughs (the MacGuffin mineral that entirely explains the human presence on Pandora is actually called Unobtainium) as well as some much broader ones. The action sequences are sprinkled throughout, with the only major battle happening at the end, and they're all suitably exciting and well laid out. Say what you want about Cameron, the man still knows how to do this sort of thing. I don't know how excited I am for sequels, but I totally respect him for crafting an entire world and story out of whole cloth (and maybe a few bits from other stories), making an extremely expensive movie with it, and successfully selling it to the world. If I'm not mistaken it made the whole budget back worldwide in the first two weeks, and this was the third straight weekend it made about seventy million bucks in the US alone. I don't really dislike adaptations, but I do like to see original work as well, and if this means more is coming, then I'm happy.