Machete Gross, Gory, Comical

Though Machete was written to poke at our anti-immigrant hysteria, it's more about gross, lavish, comical violence than politics. Critics aren't taking too many swings at Robert Rodriguez's latest, which features a "ferocious" Danny Trejo as ex-federale "Machete"—and a mostly naked Lindsay Lohan:

• The "fountain-like spurts of blood and the tumbling of body parts" begin immediately, writes Michael O'Sullivan for the Washington Post. But your best bet is to laugh instead of grimace, "assuming you're able to see humor in such sequences as the one in which Machete disembowels a man and uses his intestines as a rope to rappel down a building."

• Though it contains the funniest line you'll hear all year—"Machete don’t text"—Rodriguez will "never be more than a junior varsity Quentin Tarantino," writes Kyle Smith for the New York Post. "His sense of humor is as blunt as the calluses on Machete’s hard-worked palms." Trejo, on the other hand, is an "undocumented Clint Eastwood."
• Michael Phillips actually finds the "bluntly political" aspect of the film the most interesting. But "don't get me wrong," he writes for the Chicago Tribune: Rodriguez wastes "no time with sober discussion of US immigration policy, or a serious investigation into the matter of Jessica Alba and why she never seems to get any better as an actress."
• "As a political statement, Machete is more a hammer than the titular blade," writes Ian Buckwalter for NPR. But Rodriguez wasn't tasked with making "a subtle, nuanced film. The exploitation template at work here requires only a wild, fun ride, and by those raw standards, the movie delivers."

(More Robert Rodriguez stories.)