Sorry, this movie sucks

Overrated and overhyped

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

I honestly thought it was a good flick -- worthy of 8-stars, but I'm giving the film 10-stars to counteract the tool who said he gave it 1-star because he thought the overall rating was too high. :)A powerful and realistic look into the gang culture within the Mexican American population. Very gritty and very disturbing, as a it should be.

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.

American Me is, to say the least, one hell of a rough and raunchy movie-ride.American Me drags the viewer straight down into a literal cesspool of crime, where 'cut-throat' violence and murder prevails.To give you some idea of what you're in for with this flick - There are a total of 6 - Yeah. That's right - 6 rapes in this flick. Of these 6 rapes (all violent, of course), only one is a heterosexual rape. With American Me's running time of 2 hours, that averages out to be about one rape every 20 minutes. Is that good, or bad? I guess it all depends on your own personal view of homosexual rape. For me, one rape would've be quite enough. I get the message. Thank you, very much.Set in Los Angeles, American Me ambitiously attempts to cover 30 years in the life of a Chicano Gang Leader named Santana. Of those 30 years covered in this flick (from the age of 19 to the age of 49), Santana spent a whopping 18 of them behind bars in Folsom Prison, California. All of Santana's crimes were, in one way, or another, related to heavy-duty drug dealing and/or armed robbery.While serving time in prison Santana, a real shrewd and ruthless operator, quickly became the undisputed ringleader of what was known as the Mexican Mafia. It was, literally, he who ruled over the drug dealing and murder inside Folsom. Any in-mate who ever dared to double-cross Santana, for whatever reason, was unmercifully subjected to the most unbearably violent gang rape imaginable, and, then ultimately murdered. Any murder ever arranged by Santana was always carefully orchestrated so as to appear as if it were purely accidental.Of his time spent outside of prison, Santana just couldn't cut the mustard. He sincerely did try to turn over a new leaf, but, no way. He just couldn't seem to avoid getting caught up in the same old 'cat-and-mouse' game of crime, all over again. It didn't take long for Santana to be pounding the beat behind bars, again, serving, yet, another long term of sentence.Santana is eventually stabbed to death in prison, where his own men betray him and even take part in his murder.As movie-entertainment, American Me has a fierce, raw power, all of its own. With its eyes wide open, American Me doesn't flinch from reality once. It forces and compels the viewer to watch all of the unpleasant, gut-wrenching horrors of prison-life, defying anyone to turn their eyes away from the atrocities on the screen.Released in 1992, American Me is an impressive directorial debut by Edward James Olmos, who also played the part of the hardened criminal, Santana.

Great movie, because its a true story. Which today La Eme is alive and well as well as Nuestra familiar, two of the strongest and scariest Mexican/American gangs around. For those who don't understand gang activity may have a hard time understanding the movie, and may feel it might be corny though this stuff happens everyday and let me tell you it's not corny,it happens in our country everyday. Watching this film will open up your eyes and understand how serious our gang issue is in our country. You may thing that it's just another movie and that is was cheesy, but remember again this stuff happens everyday,it may not occur in your neck of the woods, though when you least expect it La Eme or Nuestra familiar might be near?