By Dylan Dixon
Somewhere between La La Land and Blood in, Blood Out falls Lowriders. Like a teenager or early adult, Lowriders is unsure what it aspires to be.
In the film, actor Gabriel Chavarria, who plays Danny, is an aspiring street artist in modern-day Los Angeles.
His father, Miguel, played by Demian Bichir, has a passion for lowriders and can’t wait for the annual lowrider competition, where he hopes to win big.
The eldest son to Miguel and just out of prison, Francisco, is played by Theo Rossi.
The beginning of the movie is a mixture of continuity mistakes, cheesy dialog and unnecessary voiceover.
Every opportunity Miguel gets to speak, he hypes up the lowrider competition, making it the center of focus for him and the film.
Francisco’s resentment and anger towards his father is built upon a lazy excuse. Francisco’s character has so much anger towards his father that he decides to enter his lowrider in the competition
in an attempt to beat his father.
Meanwhile, Daniel suddenly begins to have anger towards his father either out of peer pressure from his brother, or because the writers wanted to attempt to make a more emotional story.
After what seems like forever, the big day arrives, what everyone has been talking about every two minutes: the lowrider competition.
Soon after, a winner is chosen, and it is assumed the movie will end soon.Unfortunately that was not the case.
The duration of the film was a constant struggle for the audience to refrain from scrolling through their phones.
Every so often I would catch a different person with the glow of their cell screen in their face.
The story began to grow even more out of its realm, trying to make itself a drama, car flick and gangster film all without digging deep into any characters or storylines, causing for a feeling of disconnect from the characters and story.
The laziness, or amateurity of the writers shows throughout the entire film. Especially in those scenes where occurrences are out of control.
For example, the only true reason the story continues to flow onto the next scenes is only because items and events fall perfectly onto the main characters’ lap in a completely unrealistic manner.
Most “emotional scenes” are masked as being emotional in the first place only because they yell and cry when they have no business doing so.
All the yelling and crying still couldn’t conceal the cheesy, hilarious dialog.
Director Ricardo de Montreuil was impressive only when he showed us a typically unknown music venue, The Smell, in Downtown, Los Angeles.
With the cheesy dialog, false advertising of lowrider culture, voiceover that could have been replaced with better dialogue and clever shots and an overall vibe that would make anybody ask, “What am I watching?”
Lowriders had the potential to be legendary, but will most likely go down as, “that one movie with Eva Longoria and that guy from Sons of Anarchy.”
