When Alex Jones expressed concern in May
that a leaked script portrayed white characters as vehemently racist and wantonly murderous, or that a Latino mob is roused to take on border vigilantes in racial conflict, director
Rodriguez assured Ain’t It Cool News, that he’d ‘had too much tequila,’ and that those types of scenes wouldn’t make it to the final edited version. Producer
Elizabeth Avellan went on the attack just before the release, defending the
tax incentives ‘Machete’ had practically already been assured. Avellan denounced the ‘uproar over the film’ as “unfounded and unnecessary,” stating there was ‘no reason for a denial of incentives’:
“A lot of people made up a lot of stuff in terms of what the movie is about and who the bad guy is,” she said. “There were a lot of things that people misconstrued … without even knowing the script and pretending they have a script.”
Now there is no doubt.
Everything Jones quoted from the script was on screen in one form or another– and its tone was clear: opposition to illegal immigration is tantamount to murder, white racism and vile Machiavellian scheming. One scene that was excised from the script repeated the one-sided demonization of the
Freedom Force vigilantes, who were to murder a young child on the border at the end. However, that ending was left behind for a different sequence altogether.
Reviewers like
‘Big Hollywood’ panned the film as ‘Dull, Convoluted, Racist and Anti-American,’ criticizing that:
“’Machete’ offers no middle ground, no reasonable, non-racist position against wide open borders for those fleeing from what one character describes as the “personal hell” that is Mexico.”Who the illegals fight against on screen is one thing. What their words mean is altogether something else. That’s the shell game Rodriguez plays and his racially divisive messaging goes way beyond the normal cinematic political posturing and button-pushing. And you will never see a more stereotypically racist portrayal of Southerners, who, in an obvious reference to the border Minute Men, are not only played for cheap laughs but portrayed as sub-human animals who hunt and murder illegals – kill a helpless pregnant woman and say “Welcome to America.”
Rodriguez & crew played everyone as fools, knowing full well what the film would contain. Does Texas want to subsidize the films of Robert Rodriguez and continue to give him a platform to spew divisive racially-tinted trash oriented at Hispanics and attempting to radicalize their views?
Rodriguez is the face of the Texas Film Commission’s tax incentives program, and has been virtually guaranteed up to $60 million in rebate funding for a package of films.