Director Robert Rodriguez’s trailer for Machete, the full-length B-movie starring Danny Trejo that got its start as a fake trailer inGrindhouse, comes “with a special Cinco de Mayo message for Arizona,” which basically boils down to the film’s tagline: “They Just Fucked With the Wrong Mexican.” This fire-starting attitude infuses the entire trailer, leaving us with the impression that Machete might just be that rare thing: a genre exercise (of a B-movie no less!) that stays super-fun at feature length. Trejo plays Federale Machete, who is “set up, double-crossed, and left for dead,” going on to encounter Robert De Niro, Cheech Marin, Jessica Alba, Michelle Rodriguez, Lindsay Lohan (in a nun’s habit), and, oh yes, Steven Seagal, all doing their campiest, in terrible lighting, while discussing immigration (look for Alba’s delivery of “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us!”) and other more classic B-movie concepts. It works.
