Review: El Chicano Is a Superhero Movie Without the Mythic Grandeur

Ben Hernandez Bray’s El Chicano is an unlikely superhero movie. Like most, it’s rooted in myth and trauma, pivoting on a hero who must harness his power and unleash it in ways that will save the world. Only here the world is east Los Angeles, the myth is cultural inheritance, and the hero is a police officer, Diego Hernandez (Raúl Castillo), whose profession doesn’t square with his newfound role as moral judge, juror, and executioner.

The film begins in the past, with young Diego (Logan Arevalo) and his twin brother, Peter (Julian Bray), at a literal and figurative crossroads outside their friend Jose’s (Adolfo Alvarez) house. As Jose is pulled into the home and spanked by his mother, the brothers gawk at Jose’s father, Shadow (Emilio Rivera), an injured gang lord, as he holds court on the street. He and his goons puff their chests, as do the police, headed by Captain Gomez (George Lopez), who arrive on the scene to question the man for violent crimes he no doubt committed. Tensions flare, then subside, and almost as soon as the myth of El Chicano is conveniently spelled out for us, the vigilante promptly arrives to do the work that the police cannot.

The function of El Chicano’s violence is the conscience of the film, which has been written by Hernandez Bray and Joe Carnahan with an eye and ear for detail that’s at once refreshing and obligatory. In the present, Peter (played by Castillo in flashbacks) is dead and Jose, now known as Shotgun (David Castaneda), has followed in his father’s gangland footsteps. Diego and Shotgun are now enemies and, of course, will lock horns to the bloody end, but not before the former learns the exact cause of his brother’s death and adopts El Chicano’s identity.

At the root of the film is an essentially conservative belief that non-white, low-income communities are prone to self-destruction. On the other hand, El Chicano is wise to frame its vigilante justice as a response to the lack of response by those outside of such communities. Either way, the film peddles notions of self-realization and self-actualization that might have felt less moth-eaten had Hernandez Bray’s direction lent them mythic grandeur.

The filmmaker got his start as a stuntman, and there’s an impressively propulsive—and pulpy—charge to one scene where Diego must drive his way out of a shootout as his partner (Jose Pablo Cantillo) bleeds profusely from the neck. But El Chicano is otherwise stuck drearily hop-scotching between genre modes, at times suggesting a horror film on the soundtrack while on the screen El Chicano enacts his earnest and camp-free ultra-violence. It’s a spectacle so emotionally enervated that it’s hard to believe El Chicano’s mantle is one that anyone will ever be emboldened to take up once he decides to put his mask down.