Machete Kills (2013)

Robert Rodriguez returns to the exploitation sandbox with Machete Kills, a sequel that treats the border, the White House, and low Earth orbit as interchangeable backdrops for dismemberment. Danny Trejo's ex-Federale is conscripted by a President played by Charlie Sheen under his birth name, a joke the film considers too good to explain. The plot involves a cartel, a mad revolutionary with a missile wired to his own heart, and a billionaire arms dealer who intends to flee a nuclear apocalypse he arranged himself. Nobody here has a thought they cannot express by firing something.

The cast is a genuine polyglot of genre faces, with Demián Bichir, Sofía Vergara, Michelle Rodriguez, Antonio Banderas and Cuba Gooding Jr. all given real work to do. Rodriguez assembles such ensembles the way other directors assemble cars, and the film never stops to congratulate itself for it. Michelle Rodriguez's one-eyed Luz runs a network and dies still swinging, which satisfies an old grindhouse appetite for tough women without offering anything resembling an argument. The shapeshifting assassin El Camaleón, played in rotation by Lady Gaga, Gooding Jr., Walton Goggins and Banderas, reads as a casting stunt with a loose genderfluid gloss. Mel Gibson's villain is a rich man who wants to leave the planet, which the film finds funny and never examines.

What the picture lacks is any interest in instruction. There is no environmental conscience, no body-positive gesture (the camera leers without apology), no history it wishes to correct, and Mendez's split personality is a plot device and a villain's pathology, not a portrait of a mind. The border politics are set dressing for gunfire. It is a disreputable object, cheerfully so, and it lectures nobody about anything. For that alone, in this climate, it earns a grudging nod.