Machete is the long-awaited latest offering from Robert Rodriguez, the man behind Desperado, Sin City, Planet Terror and the second half of From Dusk ‘Til Dawn. Originally conceived as a spoof trailer to play in cinemas before Planet Terror, Machete was apparently too much of a good joke to pass up. The tagline ‘they f***ed with the wrong Mexican’ was expanded to a full feature film featuring high quotients of gore and guns in the mock-exploitation 70s style that Rodriguez is becoming renowned for.

Danny Trejo takes on the role of the titular Machete, a blade-wielding badass that bears an uncanny resemblance to the similar character he played in Rodriguez’s earlier film Desperado. Once a Mexican Federale betrayed by his corrupt colleagues and left for dead, Machete is now roaming lost on the other side of the border in southern Texas like a ronin samurai from a kung fu film. Approached by a mysterious businessman named Michael Booth (played by Jeff Fahey) he is coerced into assassinating the local senator John McLaughlin (played by Robert De Niro). However, the senator is only wounded and Machete is only a patsy for a more complex conspiracy concerning the senator’s re-election, and the control of illegal immigration between Texas and Mexico. Things are made more complicated by the presence of Jessica Alba’s immigration cop Sartana Rivera and Michelle Rodriguez’s underground kingpin Luz.

Like many of Rodriguez’s films, style comes ahead of story, but in Machete the set pieces sit a little awkwardly alongside the topical, political wrangling. The dialogue is hard-boiled and almost deliberately cheesy throughout. As a consequence though you never really warm to any of the characters, and although many of them are subsequently dispatched with aplomb it is difficulty really to care. De Niro is as wooden as ever, and Steven Seagal’s few appearances are barely capitalised on. The film is really stolen by Cheech Marin as a sweary gun-toting, joint-smoking priest, and by the chucklesome goons guarding Booth’s house (one of whom upon seeing Machete for the second time says ‘I quit’, hands him his gun, and runs off into the undergrowth).