Machete Kills

Machete Kills isn't as good as Machete. There aren't as many big surprises, some of the jokes/ideas that come around again aren't funny a second time, I didn't buy half the performances, and it drags in quite a few places. It still has some great gags, lines, and situations, though, and it was a lot more fun than Gravity.

 Machete was a great movie, so I was hoping Machete Kills would be good. Roeper only gave it a C, but I don't know how much I can trust him anymore. Based on that review, I decided not to see it at the theater. Once it came in on DVD, I thought I did want to see it at the theater; it took so long that I forgot what I decided. But now that I've seen it, I'm glad I didn't see it in the theater. I'm sure people would've been laughing/reacting a lot, and I hate hearing that.

It wasn't quite as good as Machete, but it was still worth seeing. I loved the Mendez character. He was a lot of fun. You could tell that guy was loving playing that part. It was perfect when he slipped into the secret agent personality and Machete said, "How many of you are there?" and he responded, "That's classified." It's kind of weird how psychological the movie is. Traumatic events like the one Mendez went through really do cause people to develop MPD.

I didn't like the Desdemona character at all. Something about it made me uncomfortable. It was just bad taste to have this poor sexually abused woman acting out like that. It was really sad, actually. Pretty much all of her lines just made me feel bad. I was probably putting more thought into it than I should've, though. I did think her "strap on" was funny. The "no freebies!" line didn't work at all, though.

El Camaleón was really cool. The first actor was kind of weird. I love the way they got four actors into the movie. Antonio Banderas was the best one. I think he's my favorite actor to see in a cameo. He always does a great job. The scene where El Camaleón dies just didn't work at all for me, though. And then he was in the trailer for the next one, so is he even dead? I guess I just need to accept that in this genre, people get shot a lot without dying.

Mel Gibson was really weird as Voz. I couldn't get past the fact that he's such a terrible person in real life, and he's not looking good at all. I kind of started to buy into it a little about halfway through his part, but I never fully got there. I did think the hovercraft thing was a cool idea, though.

Charlie Sheen was pretty good as the President. I didn't buy into that 100% either, but he did have a few good lines. It was great that they credited him as Carlos Estevez. I love that they got Elon Musk and SpaceX in there. That was a cameo I wasn't expecting.

Amber Heard seems to be getting typecast as a certain character now; bitchy but powerful, I guess. Miss San Antonio was really weird. I couldn't pin her down to decide if I liked her or not. And I didn't buy that a federal agent or whatever she was supposed to be would be that interested in winning pageants, so much that she'd be willing to betray the government. I figured out she was a pawn for Voz when she got the second bouquet of flowers from him and we found out he sponsored the pageant.

The exchange she had with Michelle near the end about dressing to the nines was so flat and terrible. Maybe it was supposed to be like that as part of the joke. There's so many parts of the movie that work perfectly, though, the parts that don't seem really out of place. The editing/camerawork was really weird in places, too, like weird jumps in the angles of people's faces when you switched cameras. I don't know if that was intentional or not, either. If it was, I don't know what it was possibly supposed to contribute.

I loved seeing Michelle come back. She's a great actress, and she's perfect for the role. There wasn't anything off about her performance at all. I was disappointed that Sartana died so early. I'm not sure I really believed Jessica Alba in that role anyway, though. Miss SA's dresses were pretty. I especially liked the blue one. It was so fluid, it looked really good. It was pretty funny when they did the "3D" for her sex scene, too.

I liked that they brought that one guy back as a clone. I was like, "how is he still alive?", and that was a good explanation. Voz's prescience was interesting, too. Somehow it seemed perfectly plausible to me. I was like, "Oh, you went into space and somehow you just became prescient, sure." It was an interesting twist that he had a "Mendez" in every country, too. The heart was gross, though. I could've done without it being featured so frequently.

It's interesting that Rodriguez did Once Upon a Time in Mexico, because the makeup job on Michelle's eye totally reminded me of Johnny Depp's from that movie. It was a bummer that they shot out her other eye. She really should've died from being shot like that, too. From the trailer for the next one though, it looks like she gets some kind of bionic eye, so I guess that'll be cool. It was weird when she threw the tiara at Miss SA and it got stuck in her chest. It wouldn't do much damage there. It wouldn't reach her heart or anything, so it was pretty ineffective.

I hope they leave Machete as a trilogy. It's interesting, but I don't think it needs to go beyond three movies. Machete was full of surprises and explosions and awesomeness, and Machete Kills was just kind of mundane, and it seemed to drag on forever. It still had some great lines, gags, and moments, but Machete is definitely the better movie.

It was pretty crazy when Machete rode the missile, and when he was swinging around on the helicopter blade. I don't like the fact that he's so invincible. Danny said in the "making of" that he likes the character because he's not a superhero, he's just a regular guy. But if you're going to make him invincible, then he stops being a regular guy. I think the "Machete don't" joke lost its novelty after "Machete don't text." You can't really bring it back again after that one. The look he gave Michelle after saying "Machete loves everyone" was priceless, though. It was practically worth watching the entire movie just for that.