El Chicano is a movie that came out in 2018. When I first seen the trailer for it, it was a movie that I wanted to see. It looked good, and it had a cast of what seemed like mostly Chicanos.

As we all know, a Chicano based movie only comes out once every blue moon, so when one does come out, it’s usually a must see. Unfortunately, I never was able to watch El Chicano and completely forgot about it. Here we are in 2023, and after seeing that it was on Amazon Prime, I went on ahead and paid for it to see it.

The legend of El Chicano

Before sharing the plot of this movie, I am going to share a little bit about the legend of El Chicano. El Chicano has been linked with the superhero label, many calling him the Mexican Batman, but for some reason, after watching the movie, I just didn’t see it like that.

Sure, El Chicano and Batman are both good guy vigilantes with unique modes of transportation with no out of this world superpowers. They both go after bad guys with their knowledge and gadgets, but to me El Chicano just didn’t fit the superhero label.

The legend of El Chicano goes back some 80 years. He is seen as some kind of boogeyman as he has been going after and killing bad guys for generations.

He’s a cool looking guy as he rides a Chopper motorcycle, wears a black hooded jacket and wears a cool looking mask covering the bottom of his face. When on the hunt to get a bad guy, he will put a graffiti symbol on a stop sign around the area he is going to make a hit. Later, the sign ends up being knocked down.

During the movie, we also learn that El Chicano is not just one man. The legend started in the 1940s when one man in East Los Angeles took on the role of El Chicano, put on his costume and killed bad guy thugs. Eventually, after a certain amount of years, this man would step down as El Chicano and someone else would take on the role.

Nobody ever knows that there are rotating men taking over as El Chicano except for the individuals that take on the role. Everyone else thinks El Chicano is the boogeyman. In the movie, we learn that Pedro was being groomed to be the next El Chicano, and Diego eventually becomes the next El Chicano.

Plot of the El Chicano movie

The basis of this movie has to do with a vigilante that is known as El Chicano. We learn that El Chicano is a good guy superhero type that defends the streets from gangsters and thugs by eliminating them. This is obvious from the beginning of the movie when three young kids, two of them twin brothers named Diego and Pedro along with their friend Jose watch El Chicano kill Jose’s father Shadow.

The wheelchair stricken Shadow is a shot caller gangster and mans up in from of his homeboys, unfortunately for him he is no match for El Chicano who rides up and takes care of business with his cool looking mask that covers the bottom of his face, black jacket and his Chopper motorcycle.

The movie then takes a turn in time as Diego (Raul Castillo) is grown up and a Los Angeles police detective. Apparently, his brother had lived a rough life and supposedly ended up committing suicide. As for the friend Jose (David Castaneda,) he ends up following in his dad’s footsteps and becomes a gang leader going by the nickname Shotgun.

Diego and his partner investigate a crime scene where all of Shotgun’s homeboys have been killed. The only survivor is Silent (Noel Gugliemi.) They pick him up for questioning, but while in the back seat of the police car, Silent gets shot and killed. Diego then goes to Shotgun to get some answers, but there is no cooperation from his old friend.

Father Jesus (Marco Rodriguiz,) who is somewhat a mentor to Diego, lets Diego in on some information by telling him that his brother Pedro became a changed man after he had gotten out of prison. Curiosity about his brother leads him to a hidden storage that Pedro used to rent. Inside, Diego finds that his brother had began to resurrect the mantle of El Chicano.

A further investigation into things also suggest that Pedro may not have killed himself. Diego and his partner then stake out a party held by Shotgun. They are spotted, and Diego gets injured while his partner gets killed.

Captain Gomez (George Lopez,) tells Diego that he should send his mom and girlfriend away for a while until things settle down. Diego, unsettled with the death of his partner, along with the death and findings about his brother decides that Captain Gomez is right. Diego visits Father Jesus again, and he takes a tecpati Aztec war knife from there to go back to his brothers storage and finished up the mantel of El Chicano.

Diego then goes hunting for Shotgun as El Chicano for the first time and finds him at a nightclub. Diego beats up his bodyguards as Shotgun runs from the scene with another guy nicknamed Jaws. Jaws, who also knew Diego’s twin brother Pedro is killed by Shotgun during their escape. Here’s the kicker, Jaws is the son of El Gallo; a cartel leader. Shotgun puts the blame on El Chicano. El Gallo then swears revenge on El Chicano and the police.

The cartel then blows up the police station and Diego finds an injured Captain Gomez. Gomez lets Diego know that his police officers had been kidnapped. On a side note, Captain Gomez does suspects that Diego is involved with everything that is going on; basically has a hunch that Diego is the new El Chicano.

El Gallo has a plan to execute the officers. Diego, again as El Chicano rescues the cops, kills the cartel members and finally kills El Gallo. With no more distractions, Diego can once again go after Shotgun.

Diego, El Chicano, goes chasing Shotgun into a cemetery and they begin to fight. Shotgun sees this as his chance to get revenge on El Chicano for killing his father Shadow. Diego sees this as a chance to get revenge on Shotgun for killing his twin brother Pedro, who was being groomed to take over as El Chicano but never got the chance. After the brutal fight, Diego ends it with a knife strike to Shotgun. As Shotgun is dying, Diego removes his El Chicano mask so Shotgun can see who he is.

Diego, bloody and injured badly ends up passing out. Captain Gomez finds him first before the rest of the police officers show up. This prevents Diego from getting arrested. Captain Gomez, who has also worked with others in the past that have take on the El Chicano role, makes sure that his great investigator is not identified as El Chicano.

Is El Chicano a good movie?

Did I waste my time watching El Chicano? No, it was a decent movie. Was El Chicano as good as I thought it would be? No, it was not. That is probably due to the fact that I thought I was going to watch a super hero movie, but it seemed more like a police drama movie. So, I probably set myself up for a bit of disappointment. Overall though, I would say that El Chicano was a good movie.

Besides the beginning of the movie, we don’t see El Chicano again until Diego takes on the role an hour in to the movie. I understand though as the movie had to set up the plot. If you like a movie with action and gun fights, El Chicano is a movie that you will enjoy. There are a lot of action scenes. Again, a good police drama movie that will certainly entertain you.

The all Latin cast was certainly a move in the right direction. Before the release, it had been around 20 years since movies like Selena, Mi Familia and La Bamba were out. After watching El Chicano, it made me wonder why a part 2 has not been made. At the end of El Chicano, the wife of El Gallo and the mother of Jaws, La Hembra (Katie Del Castillo,) is seen at a funeral in Mexico. She stands in between two caskets speaking in Spanish and swears revenge on El Chicano before firing rounds in the air. It seemed like a perfect set up for a part 2 where we would see more of El Chicano in character.