El Chicano 2019 - Full Movie, Watch Free Online in HD

El Chicano:

In the ultraviolent east Los Angeles epic “El Chicano,” a police officer, Diego Hernandez (Raúl Castillo), finds himself at a moral crossroads when he unearths a connection between his late brother, Pedro, and the execution-style killing of local gang members. As Diego dives into Pedro’s past, he enters a punishing street war that quickly becomes painful to watch.

In Pedro’s journals, Diego discovers a plan to recreate El Chicano, a masked vigilante who terrorized the gangs of the brothers’ youth. Though Diego is at first disturbed by his brother’s references to Mexican-American revolution, the escalating bloodshed in his community soon drives Diego to take up the mask his brother left behind.

[With its mostly Latino cast, “El Chicano” struggled to find backers in Hollywood.]

As El Chicano, Diego adopts a ferocious approach to fighting crime, training his body to be a weapon alongside his guns. The director Ben Hernandez Bray began his career in Hollywood as a stuntman, and though too many bones are crunched to describe this film as elegant, Bray directs action with merciless kinetic logic.

The physical effect of violence in this film is made abundantly clear, but the political and thematic purpose of including such brutality remains murky. Neighbors, childhood friends and family members clash, but the supposed heroes are as ruthless as the villains. Bray seems to want to portray a culturally specific version of Mexican-American identity — complete with a mostly Mexican-American cast, on both sides of the law — but it’s hard to be entertained by the spectacle of brutality when campiness is entirely absent. Here, when cop fists meet cartel skulls, the impact feels sickening, and it’s no less sadistic when the roles are reversed.

When the filmmakers Joe Carnahan and his best friend, Ben Hernandez Bray, began showing around their script for a new superhero movie in early 2017, they said, studio honchos and moneymen lavished it with praise. The movie, “El Chicano,” offered an origin story with a fresh take: a Mexican-American cop who lost a brother to gang violence adopts the mantle of a masked avenger to take on a cartel.

But a crucial part of the script gave prospective backers pause. All of the main characters were Latino, and virtually all of the minor characters were, too. In the eyes of potential investors, that made the film a risk.

“Because we weren’t making ‘La Bamba’ or ‘Selena,’ I don’t think they could wrap their heads around an entirely Latino cast,” said Carnahan, whose movies include “Narc” and “The A-Team.” At least one executive told him that he needed to find a “Caucasian influence” in the film. Perhaps the grizzled veteran cop character could be a white guy, or maybe the hero’s partner on the police squad?