Granite-faced tough-guy actor Danny Trejo got a new lease of life with the tongue-in-cheek grindhouse movies Machete and Machete Kills. Those at least had a bit of inventive bad taste. This is probably closer to the truth about grindhouse, without the patina of hipness and irony – it's just a terrible, lazy, cheapo-looking film with no laughs and no interest. Trejo plays a guy nicknamed "Bullet", an undercover LA cop who gets things done by bending the rules and ignoring the red tape and the bullshit. He doesn't get violent unless it's warranted. But a bad guy kidnapping his grandson? That's warranted, my friend.
And so the rickety nonsense continues, with some desert scenes that have been vaguely borrowed from Breaking Bad – Jonathan Banks, playing the criminal kingpin, is from that show's cast.
There's some stuff about Narcotics Anonymous meetings and the mixed martial arts (MMA) cage-fighting world that would appear to be taken from Trejo's personal CV and interests: he is a recovering drug addict and MMA enthusiast.
This should, in theory, give the movie a touch of veracity, but just brings it closer to being a vanity project. Not that there's anything to be vain about.
