FROM DUSK TILL DAWN: I’m a Mean Motherf*ckin’ Servant of God

From Dusk till Dawn (1996) – Directed by Robert Rodriguez – Starring George Clooney, Quentin Tarantino, Harvey Keitel, Juliette Lewis, Ernest Liu, Salma Hayek, Cheech Marin, Danny Trejo, Tom Savini, Fred Williamson, Michael Parks, John Saxon, Kelly Preston, and John Hawkes.

FROM DUSK TILL DAWN is a collaboration between Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez; Tarantino wrote the script, Rodriguez directs the script, and Tarantino acts in the script. DUSK is really two movies mashed together, the Tarantino opening setting up the Rodriguez closing, and it’s a clear first run for their Grindhouse project a decade later.

In the first half of the film, we focus on Seth (George Clooney) and Richie (Tarantino) Gecko’s run from the law. Seth is the cool bad-ass and Richie is the disturbed psychotic; the former kills only when necessary and the latter kills whenever he can. Both Clooney and Tarantino are fantastic as the brothers; while his status as an international movie star is now a given, DUSK was the film that proved Clooney could transition off the ER set and become a movie star. He’s electric as Seth, playing the cool customer who’s got the simmering anger waiting to explode beneath the surface.

We first see the brothers in action in a crummy roadside liquor store, operated by John Hawkes and visited by Texas Ranger Earl McGraw (Michael Parks, who also appears in Kill Bill and Planet Terror as the Ranger). The brothers are hiding in the back, keeping hostages close and mouths shut, but Richie kills McGraw with a bullet in the back of his head. Seth is furious, but Richie insists that he saw the cashier mouthing help to the Ranger. We know this is false, and Seth has to know this is false, but this is the lot he’s drawn so he ends up blowing up the liquor store before heading to Mexico.

They entered the store to get a map, and ended up in a bloodbath, which is the S.O.P. they follow for the rest of the film. They get a hotel room in order to contact their handler that guarantees a place for them in Mexico, and Richie ends up raping and killing their hostage. They kidnap Jacob and his two kids, Scott and Kate (Harvey Keitel, Ernest Liu, and Juliette Lewis) because they’ve got an RV that Seth is convinced can help get them across the border, and then when they stop at the Titty Twister bar to wait for their contact, a vampire massacre breaks out.

It’s the second half of the movie that most people remember, of course (I was a bit surprised when I watched DUSK again the other night that the Tarantino half of the movie takes an entire 45 minutes to work through), because this is where all the blood and killing and dancing Salma Hayek happens, but it’s the first-half of the movie that’s more enjoyable for me to watch. If Tarantino is remembered for only one thing when he’s done making movies, it will be his dialogue. While there’s nothing as memorable here as Pulp Fiction, or as cool as Kill Bill, or as intense as Inglorious Basterds, Tarantino knows how to play characters off of one another. When the Gecko brothers first encounter Jacob’s family, Seth wants to know what relationship Jacob and Scott have, asking, “What’s the story with you two, you a couple of fags?”

Jacob answers, “He’s my son.”

“How’s that happen? You don’t look Japanese.”

“Neither does he. He looks Chinese.”

“Well, excuse me all to hell.”

There’s a real unbalanced relationship between the five traveling companions that’s driven by Clooney and Keitel; Seth comes off as a likable guy, but one that’s never far from violence. He wants everyone to get along because he’s in a good mood, but Jacob stakes out his own ground in order to protect his kids. Seth is protective of the kids, too, knowing that Richie’s interest in Kate isn’t one of captor and hostage, but while he keeps Richie in check, he also lets Jacob know that he can unleash Richie if Jacob doesn’t do what he wants.

Juliette Lewis and Ernest Liu are good as Kate and Scott as two kids who obviously love their father but are also intrigued by Seth’s lawlessness. When Seth demands that everyone drinks with him, Scott and Kate are hesitant at first but willing to knock a few back. The scene works because Seth and Jacob, seated next to each other, are clearly battling for control. “Are you so much of a f*cking loser that you can’t tell when you’ve won,” Jacob asks. Seth flips, but Jacob is right and Seth knows it.

At the Titty Twister, the tone shifts from Tarantino’s slow burn to Rodriguez’s splatter revelry. A bunch of Rodriguez regulars make an appearance (Danny Trejo, Cheech Marin, Hayek), Tom Savini and Fred Williamson are tossed into the mix, and after a non-strip table dance from Satánico Pandemonium (Hayek), it’s all vampire killing until the end. All of the vamp splatter is good fun, as each of the participants falls in turn, until we’re left with Seth, Jacob, Kate, and Scott.

Jacob is bit and he forces his kids to promise him they’ll kill him once he starts to turn. They don’t want to do it, of course, but he insists that he won’t be their father any more, but rather, “I’ll be a lap dog of Satan.” The final run through the vamps is a good shootout that sees Jacob turn lapdog, Scott get devoured, and only Kate and Seth survive. Kate lets Seth know that she’s available to go with him, but Seth tells her no, that El Ray is too rough a town for her. “I may be a bastard, Kate,” he insists, “but I’m not a f*cking bastard. Go home.”

As Seth and Kate drive away in separate directions, the camera pulls back to reveal that the Titty Twister was located atop an old Aztec temple, hidden and buried but still very much active.

There’s nothing legendary about FROM DUSK TIL DAWN and I can see why people would get frustrated with a film like this; Tarantino and Rodriguez are so talented that it could seem a bit odd that they’d combine their talents for a splatterfest, but it’s movies like DUSK that provide such an insightful key to their more respected and beloved works. Tarantino and Rodriguez love the entertainment aspect of movies more than the literariness of movies; they’re no more right, of course, than those who favor the other side of the coin, but neither of these men are ever all that interested in the deeper questions of life, the universe, and everything. They’re more interested in people trying to get through the day and past the obstacle in front of them.

Tucked between Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown, between Desperado and The Faculty, (forgetting the forgotten Four Rooms, in which each directed one of the four sequences) DUSK doesn’t hold a candle to the films that come around it, but it’s still an enjoyable romp.

MACHETE: Habla Inglés? Depends on the Question

Machete (2010) – Directed by Robert Rodriguez and Ethan Maniquis – Starring Danny Trejo, Jessica Alba, Michelle Rodriguez, Jeff Fahey, Robert DeNiro, Cheech Marin, Lindsay Lohan, Steven Seagal, Electra Avellan, Elise Avellan, and Don Johnson.

There is something undeniably pleasing about watching a movie that knows what it wants to be and goes ahead and delivers it, but while MACHETE knows it wants to be one of those “Grindhouse” action movies, there is something slightly off-putting in how MACHETE manipulates the genre and the expectations of the audience in order to deliver the expected thrills.

That seems like a completely silly thing to say, of course, and maybe it is, but MACHETE is an odd-mix of Robert Rodriguez staples who seem right at home (Danny Trejo, Cheech Marin), legitimately good actors who usually get B-movie roles (Jeff Fahey, Michelle Rodriguez), legitimately bad actors attempting to buy some cool (Steven Seagal, Lindsay Lohan), a star no one quite knows what to do with because she’s not very good as an actress (Jessica Alba), and Robert DeNiro, who looks like he wandered onto the wrong set and decided to don a silly accent and costume in the hopes the studio people wouldn’t find him and force him to go back to work on the latest Fockers movie. Then there’s Don Johnson, who actually feels like he belongs in the movie more than anyone else, including Trejo. Throw in some contemporary politics and MACHETE ends up being its own kind of unsatisfactory urban fantasy – one where you can fight the system by physically fighting the system.

The inclusion of actors like DeNiro and Alba hurt the movie more than they help it because if this was a true B-movie, I’m guessing there’s no way either one of these two would be in it, but because it’s Rodriguez (for my money, one of the best directors working right now) and because Rodriguez is cool, he can get them. Now, granted, neither DeNiro or Alba are what they were. DeNiro Being DeNiro is at least 13 years in the rearview (in 1997 he was in Wag the Dog, Jackie Brown, and Cop Land; since then there’s been a lot of silly comedies and limp cop movies) but he’s still considered one of the Great Actors.

Alba is truly one of those professional oddities that crop up from time to time in every line of work; she’s not a very good actress (at times she is truly awful) but she has some cache as a star. Why? Just because she’s gorgeous? This is Hollywood – there are gorgeous women struggling to get bit parts as “Dead Corpse #2″ on CSI: Miami. (David Caruso would have been awesome in this movie.) I think some of it is that Alba just genuinely seems like an awesome person. Doesn’t she just seem like an incredibly likeable person to you? I know that I see her on screen and I want to like her. I want her to be in movies and have a good career and stay out of the gossip mags and raise her kids without trouble and all that. Why? Just because she’s gorgeous? I don’t buy it.

What I do buy is that she seems to be at a kind of professional crossroads in her career – sure, she’s hot, but I get the feeling that this isn’t enough for anyone anymore – not me, not Hollywood, not the movie going audience, and importantly, not even her. Heck, the Crazy Babysitter Twins (Electra and Elise Avellan) appear here as, um, Crazy Nurse Twins(?) and they’re every bit as gorgeous as Alba is, so why does she get to play the lead and they get to appear as fetish objects?

This scene is not actually in the movie. I'm pretty sure you don't mind seeing it anyway.

When I see Alba in a movie, I picture studio execs struggling to find the right vehicle to put her in to take advantage of this good will she’s accumulated. It’s like they’ve tried action movies, rom coms, horror films, superhero movies, silly comedies, indie comedies … all without any satisfaction. When I see her in MACHETE all I can think (and I know this is a horrible thing to say, especially since it’s not true) is that she’s on some studio contract with five films left and they’ve completely given up on how to use her so they’re just dumping her in things, hoping she can pull in a few viewers to make the cheap-ass movie without mass appeal profitable.

So when she’s in something like MACHETE, it just feels like the wrong fit. She has this eternally youthful, soft look that makes her totally out of place in the hardened world of MACHETE. Which, I get it, is the point. But just because it’s the point doesn’t mean it works. It worked fine in Sin City because that movie was so stylized that an idealized beauty looked perfectly at home, but here her youth, her softness, her less-than-stellar acting just gets her destroyed in every scene she’s in, and when she decides to run off with Machete (Trejo) at the end, it feels like a stupid decision by an impressionable girl, not a hard decision by a grown up.

I get that Alba’s softness is supposed to be the perfect binary for Michelle Rodriguez’s bad-ass-ness; that we’re watching the woman who’s still really a girl squaring off with the woman who’s lived longer years than her age. One is an idealistic cop living by the code of law and the other is the realistic self-styled freedom fighter living by the code of life. I get what Rodriguez (Robert) is going for here, but Alba just can’t stand up to Rodriguez (Michelle). Whenever they’re on the screen together Rodriguez just eats Alba alive. She doesn’t even need to try – the merest look, the smallest shrug, and Alba withers away.

All of Alba’s withering would ultimately pay off if I believed her conversion narrative, but I don’t. I understand her changing empathy, but when she stands on a car and rallies the Mexican crowd by using the tired, “We didn’t move across the border, the border moved across us” speech, I can’t believe they don’t laugh at her. Rodriguez simply fails to provide a convincing epiphanic moment for Sartana Rivera. She pays no price in this whole bloody tale. For all the violence, all the gore, all the gunshots and bullet wounds and splattering of blood, Sartana Rivera is never really anything more than Jessica Alba at a photoshoot, always looking totally idealized and slightly apart from the world she’s in, so when she climbs onto Machete’s lap at the end of the film, it still feels like she’s a little girl needing someone else to tell her what to do.

(Wow. I just wrote about 900 words saying mean things about Jessica Alba. I feel like a cliché. And a dick.)

Alba isn’t the only young-but-already-a-veteran starlet walking through MACHETE. Lindsay Lohan is in the movie for some reason, and she really does seem like someone desperately attempting to re-ignite her career. Instead of ignition, she just looks like a match that’s already burned itself out. With her feathered hair and too-thin body, Lohan looks like a coked-out ’70s pornstar. (I’ll be honest – I have no idea what coked-out ’70s pornstars actually looked like, but Lohan’s MACHETE look would have been totally at home as an extra in Boogie Nights and 99% of my knowledge of late 1970s porn comes from Boogie Nights. Well, okay, maybe 95%.)

Her appearance here does feel slightly exploitative, and I don’t mean because they show off her boobs. The real world Lohan has the image of a trainwreck and her inclusion here seems as much an attempt to capitalize on that public fascination as it does because she was somehow the right actress for this character. April Booth is the daughter of Michael Booth (Jeff Fahey), and she’s a spoiled little rich girl running a porn website where she uploads pictures and videos of herself. She ends up having a threesome with Machete and her mom in a pool, and Machete steals the tape to torment her dad because Daddy has impure thoughts about her, and not because he’d be turned off by seeing his little girl and mom do it with Machete.

It feels like stunt casting as much as DeNiro’s inclusion, and while that’s not either unusual or horrible, there is an uneasiness to seeing Lohan on screen when she looks like a total mess and she’s playing a character who’s also a total mess. I kept thinking, “Shouldn’t she off somewhere getting herself together?” (Good lord, I’m old.) She looks used and tired in a way that didn’t look like it had anything to do with make-up or acting.

Danny Trejo plays Machete, a Mexican Federal agent who was betrayed by his superior officer and saw his wife killed by Steven Seagal, who’s apparently been on the Val Kilmer diet. Machete has a penchant for rescuing hot young women, but the first one in the film he tries to rescue (played by Mayra Leal) betrays him, stabbing him in the leg and giving Seagal the upper hand. It’s completely awesome to see Trejo taking the lead in a film, but it would have been more awesome ten years ago because while he might not be fully committed to the Val Kilmer diet, he looks like he’s dabbled.

Since Trejo and Seagal are both past their primes it puts a weird vibe in play in MACHETE as the two main rivals simply can’t match the physicality required to inject the film with any real energy. It’s hard not to see the bodies Trejo and Seagal used to have; like or hate their acting, Trejo was always a guy who stop you with a stare and Seagal always had hands that moved fast. Here, they look like guys past their glory days still fighting because they don’t know how to do anything else. They struggling to pull off old moves around their expanded guts, and when they do their movements are anything but fast. It looks like bad guys have to stand in place so Machete can slice them. It looks like Seagal fights with his back pushed back so he can wave his sword around his bloated stomach. Even when Seagal’s character offs himself, he basically says, “Yeah, f*ck it, I don’t want to keep doing this. Someone tell Wendy Daddy’s coming for a visit to eat her crappy new fries.”

All of this sounds like I hated MACHETE and I didn’t. It’s still an enjoyable couple of hours in front of the TV, thanks largely to the work of Michelle Rodriguez and Jeff Fahey.

Let’s start with Fahey. The dude is flat out awesome here. Michael Booth starts out as this slick businessman who hires Machete to kill Senator McLaughlin (DeNiro), only so he can betray Machete and boost the Senator’s poll numbers. But then when he hears that his daughter is in trouble, he pulls a Machete from the opening scene, driving to the bad guys’ house, killing everyone, and rescuing the naked young lady. Except that he actually saves the girl instead of getting betrayed by her. It’s in this sequence that Fahey totally comes alive; he is, unquestionably, the biggest bad-ass in the film during this rampage, and it’s to Rodriguez (Robert’s) blame that he de-fangs Booth as the film unfolds, first introducing Booth’s lusting for his daughter and then showing him coming unhinged in a non-bad-ass manner whenever Seagal shows up on the video phone.

Why? Fahey can eat Seagal alive on screen. Use it.

Then there’s Michelle Rodriguez, who would probably be the biggest action star in the world if she was a dude. (Which, granted, these days really doesn’t amount to much where CGI and costumed characters are more important than the Action Star. This, by the way, is a good thing. So I guess I’m saying if Michelle Rodriguez were a dude she’d be Jason Statham, which she already is. Don’t you love it when a point completely disintegrates? I know I do.) Totally confident, totally in charge, she rules every scene she’s in, whether she’s standing there with Alba or Trejo. Machete is supposed to be the bad ass, yet it’s Rodriguez’s “Shé” that controls the action. Perhaps the film is simply too burdened with wanting to be the gag trailer come to life, but I wish Robert Rodriguez had given us Michelle Rodriguez vs. Jeff Fahey instead of Trejo vs. Seagal. That movie would’ve crackled with an energy sorely lacking in MACHETE.

And ultimately that’s why MACHETE is an enjoyable disappointment. Or disappointingly enjoyable. It set out to be a B-movie and that’s what it is, but as Rodriguez himself has shown us in the past with Planet Terror, you can do a genre flick with low expectations and still make a heck of an enjoyable movie.

MACHETE simply lacks that spark that we’ve come to expect from a Robert Rodriguez film.

PREDATORS: Alien Monsters Kill Human Monsters And I’m Supposed to Care?

“Predators” (2010) – Directed by Nimrod Antal – Starring Adrien Brody, Alice Braga, Topher Grace, Danny Trejo, Walton Goggins, Oleg Taktarov, Mahershalalhashbaz Ali, Louis Ozawa Changchien, and Laurence Fishburne.

PREDATORS is a well made, fairly engaging, throwback action movie, but it’s a bit like going to Applebee’s – they don’t give you anything extra, their meals are okay but small, the decor favors kitschy nostalgia, and halfway home when your insides are gurgling you realize the whole experience could have been handled better.

What’s great about Robert Rodriguez movies (he produces PREDATORS) is that they are unabashedly what they are, and PREDATORS opens strong, with Royce (Brody) in freefall towards a jungle. When he hits the ground he discovers other people falling out of the sky, too, and they slowly figure out they’re being hunted on an alien world.

Eventually they run into a Predator tied up to a tree. Isobel, an Israeli sniper, tells the group that she’s read the de-brief of some incident back in ’87, which is this film’s way of tying itself into the original PREDATOR movie and distancing itself from the Danny Glover and Alien-Predator films. It’s a cool way to tie the original in – I love it when films allude to the story continuing after the final credits have stopped rolling – though I suppose it’s supposed to be momentarily confusing, right? Why is a Predator captured? Who’s been chasing them? Well, it’s not confusing because you know the film isn’t going to give you some radical change. It’s confirmed later when Laurence Fishburne shows up and he tells us there’s two kinds of Predators, the smaller kind and the bigger kind and they hate each other.

I don’t believe in the “identify” school of writing that says an audience needs to have someone to identify with in a film. This is one of the reasons every other movie that gets made either takes place in New York or has a New York character; you want to have someone with whom the most populous city in the country can identify. (Think of the newsroom seen in Ron Howard’s THE PAPER where the reporters and editors cheer that there were two New Yorkers involved in some big tragedy.) I don’t think it’s bad to have someone to identify with, but I don’t think it’s necessary.

I am more of a believer in the “empathy” school, which simply dictates that you need to have someone the audience can empathize with in your story. Again, it’s not necessary, but it helps to have one.

PREDATORS doesn’t.

The film is probably about halfway gone when the characters realize this, too, and one of them remarks that the reason they’ve been brought to this Predator Planet is because, “We’re the monsters of our world.”

Awesome, so am I rooting for the Classic Predator who’s tied up to a tree since he’s been captured by the New Predators, the New Predators who do what the Classic Predators did except look meaner doing it, or the humans? I know, I know, you’re saying, “You root for the humans, you species traitor!”

Here are the humans. You tell me who to root for:

1. an American mercenary who keeps abandoning everyone,
2. an Israeli sniper who’s the only woman in the film and thus the filmmakers feel the need to have her mother-hen everyone,
3. a Russian Spetsnaz special operative fighting in the Second Chechen War,
4. an American death row inmate who keeps trying to kill the African dude and fantasizing about going home to “rape some fine ass bitches,”
5. a Yakuza member who’s cut off two of his own fingers to atone for his sins,
6. a Sierra Leonean Revolutionary United Front soldier who admits to hunting humans,
7. an enforcer in a Mexican drug cartel,
8. a survivor of previous hunts who welcomes everyone into his home so he can attempt to kill them, or
9. Topher Grace.

See? No one.

OK, in fairness to Topher, he does play a purposeful jerk. Edwin is a doctor who seems to be the one person that doesn’t belong with the others, but that just makes you suspect him even more of being a bad guy. And he is – after the Russian goes back to save his life, Edwin doesn’t return the favor, and then tries to kill Isobel (the sniper) at the end of the film after she risks her life to save him.

There’s something laudable in having so many characters with unsavory backgrounds, and the Russian, the Yakuza, the RUF soldier, and the sniper aren’t unlikable characters despite their unlikable backgrounds, but they’re not the star, either. That’s Adrien Brody, who’s character talks like he’s trying to impersonate Christian Bale’s Batman but keeps letting everyone know he’s in this for himself, which makes me not care about him and not care about what happens to him.

When he does it at the end of the movie, abandoning the wounded Edwin and the helpful Isobel in order to attempt a solo escape, you think two things:

1. You really are a dick, and,
2. This movie has a lot in common with Pitch Black.

(This is the post for lists, apparently.)

Like a bad pulp novel, the movie eschews character development for surprises. Brody’s character ultimately decides to go back to save Isobel and Edwin, but we don’t see him coming to this change of plan. Instead, we see the space ship he hopped in blow up so his reappearance a few minutes later can be a surprise.

Except it’s not because you know the film isn’t going to dump it’s star without him having a big throwdown with the final Predator, especially since the sniper is now paralyzed thanks to Edwin really being a psychopath serial killer.

If the film had really wanted to be something, it would have let Brody get blowed up and Edwin survive after killing Isobel and the final Predator. That would have been asking too much, I suppose, and I’m not actually holding it against the movie for doing the predictable finish.

This is a predictable movie, after all, and that’s perfectly fine. When you do the familiar, however, you’ve got to execute really well, and this film only does a so-so job at that. The first half of PREDATORS, where it’s set in the jungle, resonates as a solid action movie. (Even the score seems like it’s out of the ’80s.) The second half, when they end up in Roland’s (Laurence Fishburne) secret hideout, it’s less successful.

For a good chunk of time the film becomes cramped and claustrophobic – it becomes, in essence, an Alien movie. By the time they get back outside it’s dark and you know that means Brody is going to rub mud all over himself because that’s what Ah-nold did.

Without anyone to really root for, however, it’s just and exercise in killing. There’s only 1 murder that’s really inventive, though, and that’s the death row inmate (Scoggins), who gets his spine and skull ripped right out of his body like this is the best Mortal Kombat scene ever filmed. Scoggins delivers his usual fine performance and has the line of the movie. As he walks behind Isobel, staring at her ass, she turns around and catches him doing it. “Your ass,” he says wit a smile, “is awesome.”

Other than that, it’s just a well-made, but unspectacular movie where unlikable monsters from two worlds try to kill each other.