Exclusive: A Look At The MACHETE Script!
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By El Mayimbe on
August 12, 2009
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So Robert Rodriguez got himself a crazy cast for his MACHETE movie. He got that crackhead Lindsay Lohan and he even scored himself Robert De Niro. Lohan and De Niro are gonna be in the same movie. It boggles the mind to even say that.
If there is an action script with Latinos in it, you bet your ass we are gonna take a look at it. It's almost a given.
Guest script reviewer ScriptShadow managed to take a peek at the 87 page MACHETE script and chimed in his thoughts below. Yes, it really is a super lean 87 pages. After you read his review below be sure to check out his blog at http://scriptshadow.blogspot.com/ for a look at recently sold spec scripts.
Hasta el proximo capitulo...
If you’re a writer or a filmmaker, it’s hard not to admire Robert Rodriquez’s story. Although the details have been skewed over time for maximum effect, Rodriquez’s rags to riches journey is the kind of tale that kicks us writers in the ass when we’re wondering if we should write that one extra scene on a Tuesday night at 1:30am and an early meeting the next day. He made a movie for 7000 dollars. And I’m not talking about any of that digital nonsense (which they didn’t have back then). He made a FILM for 7000 dollars. While the rest of the Hollywood bottom feeders throw up their arms and scream “There’s no way into the business but nepotism!”, Rodriquez is busy making yet another movie that his critics tell him he won’t be able to make. He lives by the simple rule that anything can be done, as long as you actually try to do it. That’s really the only thing that separates Robert Rodriquez from the rest of us. He actually does it. And that mantra has led to one of the most astonishing success stories in Hollywood history. I mean the man owns his own studio for God’s sake.
But that doesn’t mean everything he touches turns to gold. For every Desperado, we get a Lava Girl and Shark Boy (or was it Lava Boy and Shark Girl?). And in Rodriquez’s eternal struggle to do everything as fast as humanly possible (listening to his DVD commentary tracks is like listening to an auctioneer on speed), there is some definite quality slippage in the results. Machete is an odd choice for the filmmaker. For those that don’t know, the movie was born out of a faux-trailer he made for the Rodriquez-Tarantino collaboration, “Grindhouse.” For a movie experiment that was universally accepted as a failure (even for the knee-jerk apologists who spit the “DVD and Foreign sales will turn a profit” argument), it feels like Rodriquez is going back to a well that was never there in the first place. I know the Weinsteins blamed the weird double-feature style for the film’s failure. But I think that’s being optimistic. Dusty beat up 16mm callbacks to 70s exploitation films are never going to play to anyone other than a niche audience. As long as there are no ipods, no blackberries, and no Robert Pattinson in the film, today’s youth will see these types of movies as nothing more than a curiosity, the way they look at the dinosaur exhibit in the Museum of Science and Industry.
Which leads us to Machete, a script that plays out exactly like you’d expect the 90 minute extended cut of the two minute trailer to play out. Rodriquez dials up the speed like never before, racing from scene to scene so blatantly, you can actually taste his attempts at masking the lack of story. Although if I had Rodriquez with me right now, he’d probably slam his guitar over my head and say, Who cares about the story?? This is about naked women and a dude mowing down people with a blade of death! And in that sense, the script is successful in spades. And diamonds. And clubs and hearts. The chop-first and ask-questions-later main character lost his moral compass long ago when he was double-crossed by his own police force. And he’s dead set on making the world pay as a result.
We actually begin with Good Machete, a federal officer who prefers extremely long blades over these silly guns everyone else carries around. He’s been called into some sort of hotel kidnapping and instead of waiting for backup (aside: Has any movie officer in history ever waited for backup?) he charges in with the only backup he needs, his machete motherfucker! He dices up the guards until he finally finds the kidnapped chica he’s looking for. He grabs her and hurries towards safety but then…slice. Machete looks down. He’s been cut with his own machete…by the woman! Double-crossed! Or…single crossed. Or some kind of cross. Then out of nowhere comes his boss. Orders the chica to kill our hero. Machete is then sliced to bits and left inside the burning hotel to die. Yes, on page five our hero is dead.
Err…except he isn’t. Because we now cut to three years later and Machete is alive and well, working as a day laborer. As it is never explained how he escaped the hotel, your guess is as good as mine as to why he’s still alive. Pft, petty details I say. Anyway, we jet crosstown where we meet Elektra Rivers, a homeland security officer. Elektra is kind of like a Megan Fox Mickey Rourke lovechild. She’ll punch you in the face then fuck your brains out. We’ll learn more about her later because we shoot to another part of town to meet Luz, the sexy Salma Hayek-like Taco Truck owner who carries a meat cleaver instead of a can of mace. When some thugs try to mug Machete, Luz hops in so the two can chop up and pound down the wannabe gangsters into a giant mound of flesh.
A man named Michael Booth notices Machete’s unique fighting talents and asks him if he’d like to assassinate the senator for 150,000 dollars. Apparently this dickhead senator plans to use illegal immigrants to build a wall between Mexico and the United States, then send those very illegal immigrants who worked on it back to the country they came from. Machete’s not exactly the William Wallace of Mexico but 150k sounds good to him so he camps out on a rooftop and prepares to snipe the Senator during his big illegal immigrant speech. But before he can snipe him, another sniper snipes him! Machete escapes with a flesh wound but he’s been double-crossed all over again! What the fuck! This guy needs a new rabbit’s foot. Having the blade of death running around with this kind of knowledge isn’t good for business so Booth (who we find out actually works for the Senator) assigns every low-life in town to find and kill Machete.
I’m still not entirely sure why Booth would hire Machete to kill the man he works for when he didn’t want him dead in the first place but who cares! More people are about to get slaughtered by a machete!
Lucky for Machete, Elektra catches him before the thugs, and after Machete tells her his side of the story, she becomes sympathetic and decides she wants to become Machete’s girlfriend. Sure Machete was going to kill a man, but since he was actually set up, the attempted murder isn’t so bad. That’s a lesson for today’s youth. The two then team up, run around, occasionally fuck, and try not to get blown to pieces by Booth’s cronies. Needless to say, there’s a lot of machete battles, a lot of arms and legs that get hacked off, and a ton of scantily dressed women who seem to exist for no other reason than to fuck guys who like to kill people.
Now look. I realize, just like the Grindhouse films, that this is a parody of the exploitation films of the 1970s. But I stand by my belief that there’s got to be something that keeps your audience’s interest in between all the gratuitous violence. You need to give Average Joe Moviegoer something to latch onto. And there isn’t a single hook in this story you can hang your hat on. It’s too silly. Too simplistic. Too dumb. Even at a reader-friendly 88 pages this script feels 50 pages too long. I guess the ultimate question is, how long can you keep people interested in a man racing around cutting people up with a machete? 10 minutes for some? 80 for another? The answer will be different for every moviegoer. But while the gluttonous Fast Food film aficionados whoop it up with their tub of popcorn in the front row on opening day, the majority of the audience is going to be checking their watches going, “What the fuck am I watching here?”
To Rodriquez’s credit, the guy is a great filmmaker, and this script oozed with “Get it down so I can film it tomorrow” urgency. I know this will play twice as well onscreen as it does on the page. But there’s too much that needs to be saved here. It’s like Once Upon A Time In Mexico with bad production value. And that script wasn’t much better than this one. Rodriquez, I love you, but this movie is a waste of your talents. As long as you continue to spread yourself too thin, the ice will continue to crack underneath you.
Machete gets an extremely generous passing grade of C-
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Tags: movies, Action, News, Exclusive, script review, Machete, Cheech Marin, Robert De Niro, Jessica Alba, Lindsay Lohan, Michelle Rodriguez, Jeff Fahey, Danny Trejo, Don Johnson, Steven Seagal, Robert Rodriguez, Machete, News |
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