Have you ever wanted to see Danny Trejo jump out of a hospital window and repel down a building using another man’s small intestine? Have you ever wanted to see Lindsay Lohan play a wannabe porn-star with a drug problem? Have you ever wanted to see a movie that featured the above two things while still being an oddly poignant and important movie about Immigration policy in the United States? If you answered, “yes” to any of the above, then go see Machete.

The plot is insane, so I’m going to do my best to give you a feel for it without ruining it. Machete (Danny Trejo) is a former Federale whose wife and daughter were killed by his drug-lord nemesis, Torrez (Steven Seagal). Machete turns up years later in Texas as a day laborer. Things in Texas are not going well. Senator John McLoughlin (Robert De Niro) is up for re-election and is running completely on the strengthening of Anti-Immigration laws. His fervor for the subject is over the top and dripping with hate, and he’s in league with some shady characters. Among them is Von (Don Johnson), who heads up a group of vigilantes that catch and kill Mexicans attempting to cross the border. Machete gets pulled into conflict with these two (along with, of course, his nemesis Torrez) unwillingly, and it isn’t long before he’s leading the revolution against them with a band of immigrants and two bad*ss women (Michelle Rodriguez and Jessica Alba).

The film features some awesome performances. Danny Trejo is as cool as they come. Robert De Niro turns in his first performance in quite a while that doesn’t feel like he hates his job. Both Alba and Rodriguez are wonderful in their respective roles, and even Lohan is enjoyably (and self-consciously) ridiculous.  As has become the norm for Rodriguez, people bring their A-game when they get to play with him.

As a B-Movie, Machete works almost perfectly. It has gratuitous nudity, violence, and “unintentionally” hilarious dialogue, and it has them in spades. This is what we’ve come to expect of recent Robert Rodriguez movies. What I wasn’t ready for was how politically important the movie felt. All too often, goofy movies that attempt to say something political end up falling on their faces. Here, the absurdity of the villains in the film, usually a guaranteed recipe for bad “straw man” storytelling, enhanced the pro-immigration message.  It’s hard not to see the inherent hate of Arizona’s recent immigration legislation in the characters trying to destroy Machete.  And though the film is certainly not perfect (the lack of across the board character depth is disappointing, if not unexpected in this genre), it is beyond awesome, and surprisingly smart.

Sum...ology: An awesome, hysterical, and (surprisingly) intelligent B-Movie.