Thursday, May 25, 2017

Lowriders Needed More Polish Before It Could Truly Shine

Lowriders is a collaboration between two of Hollywood's biggest production companies; Ron Howard and Brian Grazer's Imagine Entertainment and Jason Blum's micro-budget wonder factory Blumhouse Productions. The two have joined forces to finance and theatrically release (via Blumhouse's self-distributing studio BH Tilt that put out recent movies like Incarnate, The Belko Experiment and Sleight) Lowriders after the movie sat on the shelf for nearly two years. Interestingly, in that time, three of its main stars (Melissa Benoist, Theo Rossi and Tony Revelori) have gotten involved in major roles in high-profile superhero projects. Hopefully Demian Bichir joins them in that regard soon!

Set around modern-day Los Angeles, Lowriders follows the plight of Danny (Gabriel Chavarria), a youngster (his age is never specified but dialogue early on seems to pinpoint him as either 18 or 19 years old) who loves his art, which consists of him plastering graffiti on public places so that "everyone can see [his] work for free", as he puts it.  One attempt to spray paint a bridge and then urinate off the overpass gets him locked up for the night, with his dad, Miguel (Demian Bichir), busting Danny and his friend Chuy (Tony Revelori) out of the slammer, much to Miguel's anger since he wants his youngest son to be more of a straight arrow than he was when he was younger.

At this same time, Danny's older brother, Francisco (Theo Rossi), gets out of prison and Francisco and Miguel's icy relationship creates more friction for a family that already has plenty of tension. Danny and Francisco bond over their mutual resentment towards their father, which occurs just as a big automobile event that Miguel is always a prominent fixture at is on the horizon. That's an event Francisco looks to win with Danny's help (he wants Danny to pain a fancy mural on the hood of the car they enter into the event) in order to hurt his father which is just one of the many ways familial conflicts comes to a major head in the plot of Lowriders.

For all of Lowriders, I kept hoping the next scene would offer a bit more insight into the way these characters behave or what makes them tick but there really isn't much in the way of dimensionality in the the individual members of Danny and his family. Miguel and his attempts to atone for his past (he's a recovering alcoholic who used to beat his kids) is probably the most interesting member of the family while Danny and Francisco have these incredibly one-note personalities that just don't gel with the character-centric vibe the movie is putting out. Lowriders wants you to become incredibly invested in these characters, but it's hard to do that when so many of the players in the plot are so thinly sketched.

Danny, for his part, has a lot of grievances with his father at the start of the story but they just melt away abruptly once his brother acts even more overtly nasty than he already has been. The father/son conflict between Miguel and Danny mostly evaporates once the third act comes around and that's a pity. A relationship between Miguel and a photographer named Lorelai (Melissa Benoist) similarly just putters out to nowhere, though those two plot developments at least have more substance to them than anything involving the mother of the family, Gloria (Eva Longoria), whose got no personality of her own beyond saying banal pieces of encouragement or condemnation to Miguel. I guess her presence in the movie does mean we get a delightful scene of her fixing an engine while talking to her husband who tells her to stop talking about girly things like dresses while fixing a car. Charming dialogue right there.

It's a pity there just isn't much going on in the family drama that drives the entirety of Lowriders because there are good elements in here. The acting is uniformly solid, especially with Bichir (though a big scene where he shows up at home drunk seems like it's channeling Emily Blunt in The Girl On The Train which is not a good thing) and though director Ricardo de Montreuil leans way too heavily on close-up shots and gratitious shaky-cam, I do like the way he frames and shoots the car-centric sequences in a way that makes the automobiles look as immediatley enticing to the viewer as they would be for Danny and his family. If only that kind of visual flourish was in service of a more dramatically engaging story.

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