User Reviews

This movie needs a month long run on HBO or Showtime, to remind people of how good it is, and hopefully create a buzz that would lead to a bluray release. Anyone with a remote appreciation of a terrific screenplay, solid acting, and neo-realistic direction would have to love this movie.

Edward James Olmos directs, and stars as main character Santana Montoya. Santana's parents are victims of a brutal and disturbing attack during Los Angeles's "Zoot Suit Riots" in the 1940s which sets the tone for Santana's power driven and violent life.

A childhood of gang activity in East Los Angeles eventually lands Santana in Folsom State Prison, where in the 1960s he starts La Eme, otherwise known as the Mexican Mafia. The gang controls all illicit commerce inside of the prison walls, from drugs to prostitution.

While paroled in the early 1970s, Santana meets Julie (Evalina Fernandez). Julie, who's aware of Santana's high profile in the criminal world, and is resentful of it for the most part, falls for him when she learns that while in prison he'd studied and read books about the Chicano political movement. Santana's childhood friend and fellow gangster, JD (William Forsythe), also a member of La Eme despite being white, is skeptical of Santana's relationship with Julie, and believes Julie's pacifist politics are rubbing off on Santana, which would make La Eme look weak in the gang world.

When Julie's cousin, "Little Puppet" (Daniel Villareal) commits a major infraction within La Eme's rules, Santana is given an ultimatum by JD to either endorse a gang hit on Little Puppet, or risk that his leadership of the gang would come into question, likely resulting in his own death. A series of incidents, including a drug overdose and a bizarre end to a date between Santana and Julia, put the two at odds, which leaves Santana at a crossroads of maintaining his gang status (and his life), or trying to salvage what little remains of his relationship with the only woman he'd ever loved. What results is both riveting and sad, and, as intended by Edward James Olmos, leaves a message about Chicano gang life in Los Angeles.

Enough controversy surrounded the movie to make another movie about in and of itself. In fact, the DVD has a documentary included in the special features called "Lives in Hazard", which goes into further detail, while also giving terrific insight to the streets of East Los Angeles in the early 1990s, including interviews with real gang members who were used as consultants and actors.

This one has fallen through the cracks, and it shouldn't have. It has a story, dialogue, and even great cinematography (which effectively captures downtown and East Los Angeles during three different eras in history) that help the film hold up twenty plus years after its release.

Over the past few years, anything that featured Edward James Olmos left be with a bit of mixed feelings about the individual. There's no doubt that he's a very talented performer, but it's his film choices that gets my goat. But when seeing the movie "American Me" knowing that he not only starred, but directed the movie, I actually was starting to take him in considerably. Knowing that such a talented performer being held back by poor decisions, we surely won't find him being wasted by his own movie.

Based on the life of Mexican mob kingpin Rodolfo Cadena (founder of La Eme), it shouldn't come as a surprise that there will some dramatization being that it's a biopic and not a documentary. This movie follows his hard-fought life, this movie is as simple as it gets, the story of how La Eme started. Montoya Santana (who was in his younger days played Panchito Gomez, later played by Olmos), is a Chicano youth growing up in Los Angeles' Barrio section forms a posse with Mundo (Richard Coca later Pepe Serna) and JD Morgan (Steve Wilcox/ William Forsythe) and dubbed the group under the moniker La Primera. One day, they took a detour through a rival gang's hangout spot, they break into a diner. The owner, who live nearby to them, catches them and sends them to juvenile hall and JD gets a prosthetic leg. This further explains why Roldolfo befriends a Caucasian guy who speaks with a Latino accent and is part of their circle. These events lead up to the gang going to jail and the formation of La Eme comes into fruition.

The film stands out as a personal pet project for Olmos as he informs his audience about the dangers of joining a gang. He speaks truly of this cause from experience being born in the Barrios himself. And even casted real prisoners from Folsom Prison as extras to prove his points.

His choices of what he brings into his movie is quite interesting and very fascinating. Such examples including the opening settings of his interpretation of the 1940's Zoot Suit Riots and it features a city war between vicious seamen in the California area as they attack Latinos predominately clad in Zoot Suits who represented Latino pride which lead to friction between Mexican-Americans and Caucasian-Americans which was what spawned gangster life among Latinos in the California area.

The soundtrack was quite impressive too featuring an eclectic array of classic songs from the 1950, 1960's and the 1970's including Ike and Tina Turner's version of Sly and the Family Stone's "I Want to Take you Higher" and Latino group Los Lobos doing Junior Walker's "Shotgun" amongst others. The film is generally one big flashback focusing on Santana's story from his childhood to his prison sentence and his narration is crisp and very well detailed.

"American Me" will not bite you to get attention, nor will it annoy you in any way. But what it does is it'll tell a wonderful story. And even you root for Santana all the way, he's in no way by any means an inspiring hero we can idolize with. Even when he tries to become a better more likable individual, we can't ignore the fact that he is a thug and a brute who gets what he deserves. The movie can be pretty ugly at times. Not Scorsese ugly, but violent enough to keep our attention going. It's a bit gooey with the rape scenes, but it still contributes in keeping with the flow of the story. Overall it's an authentic and captivating film that has a steady flow about a subject never really mentioned in movies.