'Machete' makes a lot more sense in a post-Trump election era

I liked Machete fine when I first saw it back in 2010, during its initial run in theaters.

I had been a big fan of its trailer, featured in the underrated Quentin Tarantino-Robert Rodriguez collaboration Grindhouse, and I got a kick out of its silliness and sensationalism.

Ironically, I did roll my eyes a bit at the film's overt political messaging on the topic of immigration-- not because I didn't agree with its viewpoint, I did -- but it felt like the wrong vehicle to tackle the topic. Now, in a post-Trump election period, I stand corrected. This movie, as absurd as it is, was really ahead of its time, and from a political satire perspective, quite brilliant.

It was released during the contentious fight over a particularly racially biased immigration bill that was going into effect in Arizona at the time, one that essentially empowered white citizens of that state to view their brown neighbors with suspicion and to intimidate the undocumented on a massive scale.

The law  now seems quaint by comparison to the modern-day "Trail of Tears" that the Trump administration appears to have in store for this country, but of course, this film pre-dated the real estate mogul's emergence as a real political force by at least a year (Trump's oft-forgotten 'birther' crusade would begin the following year, and his preoccupation with nativism and immigration wouldn't surface for another four).

Robert De Niro in Machete

And yet, the film features a Trump-like figure, ironically played by one of the most vocal anti-Trump celebrities out there -- Oscar-winning legend Robert De Niro. In what may go down as one of the loosest, goofiest performances of his career, De Niro plays an evil, immigrant-hating Texas senator, who literally shoots people at the border himself and stokes voters' fears about "hordes" entering the U.S. illegally to win re-election.

Upon first viewing, the De Niro's character's over the top ads featuring nefarious looking "illegals" plays as overstated parody, but during the 2016 election, Trump ran an ad that was eerily similar, although it was later revealed that the footage he used was not actually the U.S. border at all (it was Morocco).

The De Niro character is complimented by a sadistic local sheriff, almost certainly inspired by the recently defeated anti-immigrant crusader Joe Arpaio, played with the appropriate amount of malice by Don Johnson. In the film, director Robert Rodriguez makes no bones about the fact that his sympathies lie with the undocumented population, and both arch-villains get their comeuppance and then some.

Now nearly seven years later, his vision of a populace being pulled apart by racial animosity doesn't play as too hyperbolic anymore. If anything it seems naive, in the sense that good triumphs over evil in this movie with relative ease.

In the real world, concepts that just a few years ago would never have enjoyed a mainstream audience -- like Muslim registries or the re-institution of torture -- are now being bandied about as plausible policy proposals that enjoy broad support, at least in conservative circles.

And the tragedy is that there are no real-life Machetes -- outlaw former federales who inflict street justice and expose the hypocrisy of reactionary politicians. Machete, a film that is still purely fun on a pulpy level, also winds up being a prescient portrait of an America brought down by its demonization of the "other."