“Machete don’t text,” we learned in 2010’s “Machete.” The sequel, “Machete Kills,” informs us that Machete also don’t . . . tweet. Thanks, fellas, but never tell the same joke twice.
“Machete Kills,” about the ruthless and almost speechless Mexican assassin (Danny Trejo) with a face like a hunk of bark, is another Robert Rodriguez film that (like pretty much all of the others) bleeds out on its own ridiculousness. Entertainingly gruesome in parts, and not without a certain anarchic wit, it’s the kind of movie you pause to watch when it’s on TV, but after half an hour, you’ll click over to something else. In a year of superfluous sequels eagerly awaited by no one, this one is nearly as unnecessary as “Red 2” and “The Smurfs 2.”
Rodriguez (who gave screenplay duties to Kyle Ward) has a lot of nutty ideas. There’s Sofia Vergara as a whorehouse madam mowing down enemies with a machine-gun bra (I can hear the ghost of Johnny Carson saying, “Hey, I’ve heard she had ‘killer breasts,’ but this is ridiculous”). There’s Cuba Gooding Jr. pulling off his own face to reveal he’s actually Lady Gaga (who says, “Hola, motherf - - - er!”).
And there’s Mel Gibson. Playing a crazy. This part is a little too painful. Click! go the remotes. As has been the strategy of many other Hollywood types trying to bail their way out of Celebrity Jail, Gibson tries hard to “have fun with” his image, but the weird intensity he brings to his crackpot character — an inventor with a “Star Wars” fixation — is more pathetic than funny.
Yet Charlie Sheen (amusingly billed as “Carlos Estevez”) still exudes a sunny variety of lunacy, and he gets a lot of laughs as the president of the United States. Yes, President “Rathcock” orders Machete to go into Mexico and capture a revolutionary (Demian Bichir) who has plans to blow up Washington with a missile. Rathcock says his plan is not a request: “I’m president of the United F - - - ing States!”
Machete is up to his usual madcap high jinks: Disemboweling bad guys and tossing their innards over the blade of a whirring helicopter is him just getting warmed up. He splits men in two, cuts heads off and fires a molecule blaster that turns stuff inside out. What he can’t do, on-screen, is make love: That’s when Rodriguez blurs everything out with animation. Some stuff is too icky to be shown on screen, I guess.
Along the way we meet Amber Heard as a Miss Texas contestant who is also a super-spy, Vanessa Hudgens as the revolutionary’s daughter, B-movie vet William Sadler as a sadistic sheriff and Antonio Banderas as a hit man. Pretty much everyone turns out to be a double or triple agent, with suspiciously abrupt appearances and disappearances from the story that suggested a “Hey, stop by the set and I’ll put you in the movie” memo went around to all of Rodriguez’s friends. After a while, I stopped keeping track of the plot, right around 10 minutes after I figured Rodriguez stopped trying to make sense.
“Machete Kills,” possibly the first sequel to a spoof that grew out of a fake trailer I’ve ever seen, illustrates again the shortcomings of Rodriguez as against his buddy Quentin Tarantino (with whom he made “Grindhouse,” the ersatz drive-in double feature that contained the “Machete” trailer spoof). Both directors are inspired by bad movies of the late ’60s and ’70s. But Tarantino takes a dismal-looking lot of squashed grapes, ferments them in the casks of his imagination and makes beautiful wines. Rodriguez throws out the skins and stems, scrapes the stuff into a jar and sells it as grape jelly.