Wednesday’s shocking headline: ‘Machete’: The Reviews Are In!

“Machete” is everything “The Expendables” could have been but isn’t: vicious, witty, funny, ridiculous, engrossing. The sight of Sly Stallone cavorting with Dolph Lundgren and Jet Li in “Expendables” wears off pretty quickly, and what you’re left with is dull dialogue, explosions-by-numbers action sequences and characters that you never get to know enough to actually care about. As nutty as “Machete” is, it’s actually smart, with snappy dialogue, clever kills and a story line crackling with social commentary about the heated immigration debate in North America. Tweet Digg Machete (Danny Trejo) needs to check out of a hospital, quick, and alive; bad men keep trying to kill him. Both films are self-conscious throwbacks to bygone genres; part of the problem with Stallone’s movie is that it wasn’t self-conscious enough . It wasn’t much of a stretch, as the former drug addict had just gotten out of prison after changing his life with the help of a 12-step program. Devoid of any real character development or subtext, the film is a complete parody booby-trapped with over-the-top violence, blood and gore – racist and sexist to the extreme. Since that movie, the craggy-faced, tattooed Trejo has become one of film’s most dependable heavies. “I’ve never been accused of being pretty,” Trejo, 66, said with a laugh.

Might seem a little extreme but, as director/cowriter/producer/everything-else Robert Rodriguez explains, “The intestine is 10 times longer than the human body. The story is updated for 2010, but the style and tone minus the irony would have been at home in a greasy Times Square-adjacent theater in the early ’70s. I kept bugging him about it. “Then about five years ago he did this trailer in ‘Grindhouse,’ and the audience response was so great, he said, ‘Let’s do it.’ ” “Machete” also stars Robert De Niro, Don Johnson and Steven Seagal as opponents and exploiters of Mexican immigration, and Cheech Marin, Michelle Rodriguez, Lindsay Lohan and Alba as allies. “You have to understand we did this a long time before Arizona hit the map,” Trejo said of the plotline. “Robert had talked to me about the character of Machete as far back as 16 years ago when we made Desperado,” Trejo recalls. It also features nudity – is Alba really starkers in that shower? “That’s the magic of Hollywood,” Trejo revealed. “It really is her, but she had a body suit on.” As for Lohan, who goes skinny dipping with him in the film, “Lindsay is a little young girl who’s playing like any other young girl. After the various disappointments and underperformances of Iron Man 2, Robin Hood, MacGruber, Prince of Persia, Killers, The A-Team, Knight & Day, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Salt, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and The Expendables , audiences can be grateful for this lithe and knowing pastiche. “So when he finally had a script for me to read, I already knew the part. The only problem is she has a camera on her the whole time.

Machete is much more successful at finding the balance. She went to rehab and we’ve reached out to her,” said Trejo, who has counseled prisoners and addicts. “She’s going to be OK.” Maybe you remember a scene from that clip, in which Cheech Marin plays a priest called to arm himself against an angry mob?

He knows that the grand majority of the time if you want to express two sides of the story—the hick version and the Mexican version—and you want people to watch, you can’t go the drama/documentary/serious film route, because it just never works, nobody cares.” Wait a second, we said, does that mean all those gratuitous shower shots of Jessica Alba could actually be sugarcoating some kind of socio-political satire? They enlist Machete to be the patsy in a staged assassination attempt, but find they are messing with the wrong man. You can’t always count on Rodriguez to get the balance of lunacy, competence and coherence right. But here he more or less gives you exactly what you were looking for: 100 or so minutes as bloody, excessive and ridiculous as those initial 150 or so seconds.” — Shawn Levy, The Oregonian Check out everything we’ve got on “Machete.” For breaking news, celebrity columns, humor and more — updated around the clock — visit MTVMoviesBlog.com .