It does have some riveting moments and some very strong acting.

| Sep 28, 2019

Ben Hernandez Bray's "El Chicano" seldom amounts to anything more than a crude prototype for the kind of Latinx-driven superhero movies that Marvel and DC should already be making by now.

| Original Score: C- | May 14, 2019

When your lead actor doesn't seem to be having any fun in an action movie, there's not much left for audiences to cling to. Genre fans will need to look elsewhere for their gunslinger fix.

| Original Score: 2/5 | May 9, 2019

This is a nasty, brutal little movie, more in the vein of a grindhouse revenge flick than anything else. But it's effectively done...

| May 7, 2019

[El Chicano] functions most effectively when it explores the dangers of moral ambiguity.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | May 3, 2019

Like in this year's remake of Miss Bala, the Mexicans in this movie are the bad guys, the drug-running cartel members ruining it for the rest of us in the United States.

| May 3, 2019

The problem here isn't the fairly apparent budgetary limits - it's the limitations of style and imagination.

| May 3, 2019

It's dull and banal, coasting on familiarity from beginning to end. Here, the clichés don't celebrate a reunion. They're at war.

| Original Score: C- | May 2, 2019

"El Chicano" stands as a solidly acted and technically accomplished spectacle, the latter likely the result of Hernandez Bray's time delivering stunt magic behind the scenes as a stunt coordinator.

| May 2, 2019

Throughout, the film peddles notions of self-realization and self-actualization that feel nothing short of moth-eaten.

| Original Score: 2/4 | May 2, 2019

There's a need for a Latino superhero film. "El Chicano" is not it.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | May 2, 2019

It's hard to be entertained by the spectacle of brutality when campiness is entirely absent.

| May 2, 2019

Mainly a violent police procedural and vigilante drama that succeeds well enough on those terms.

| May 1, 2019

Diego... lacks any nuance as a character. He is grim and humorless, like most everything else about this film.

| Original Score: 1/4 | May 1, 2019