El Padrino (2004) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

El Padrino ("The Godfather" in Spanish) is an attempt to tell the basic Godfather storyline  - small time hood becomes king of the mobs - in a Mexican-American context. IMDb has a complete plot summary, if you really care.

I guess this film must have had some theatrical aspirations, because it stars a lot of people who used to be somebody, like Faye Dunaway, Gary Busey, Stacy Keach, Robert Wagner, and Joanna Pacula. It also stars some familiar character actors like Chucky's Brad Dourif and Jennifer Tilly. (Are those two a team now?) Whatever distribution plans the producers may have had for this movie seem to have evaporated, and it ended up being released on DVD exclusively in Belgium last year. Why Belgium? Well, it is a little known fact that the Belgians, having no colorful gangsters of their own, have adopted Mexican gangsters in a cultural exchange program. Mexico, in turn, has received many desperately-needed boatloads of light and flaky waffles.

The film was written by, directed by, and stars actor-turned-auteur Damian Chapa. I have no idea what qualified Damian for this particular task. I know that his family is Mexican, but he is a native of Dayton, Ohio and was once married to the ultimate white bread woman, uber-Canadian Natasha Henstridge, so I have to figure they probably weren't living in East L.A. It seems to me that his background qualifies him to chronicle life in the L.A. barrios approximately as well as my Polish last name qualifies me to write about the Warsaw Ghetto. To tell you the truth, I don't know whether El Padrino is authentic or not, but I doubt it. The Stacy Keach character seems to be a refugee from a Harold Robbins novel, and Ms. Tilly seems to be somewhat out of her depth. She sounds silly when she speaks Spanish, and even sillier when she speaks English with a Latin American accent. But I guess I could be wrong about that being inauthentic, because now that I think about it, she also sounds silly when she speaks ... er ... normally. In the last analysis, the authenticity doesn't really matter because the real problem with the movie is that it doesn't really seem to have much heart or originality to it. It's just going through the motions of the usual macho chest-thumping, over-the-top violence and other crazy drugged-out behavior.

The IMDB score is only 4.9, but even that mediocre result has been produced by extensive ballot stuffing. In the comments section, there are numerous scores of 10/10 supported by comments that elevate the film about to the level of Casablanca. I checked out the authors of these ecstatic reviews and found that all but one of them created an account just to review this film. The only multiple film reviewer who liked the film was a woman who only reviews Damien Chapa movies, and she reviewed this one more than once! Except for the woman obsessed with Chapa, there were three multiple film reviewers who took the time to write about El Padrino, and they scored it 1/10, 2/10, and 2/10. Two out of ten is certainly lower than I would score it, but at least those ballots are indicative of how the genuine voters react to the film.