Mark Reviews Movies: BLAST BEAT

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 20, 2021

There's a broad sense of the story Blast Beat wants to tell. In 1999, a family from Colombia, fleeing the undefined conflict within that country, comes to the United States, looking to lead new lives. The screenplay by director Esteban Arango and Erick Castrillon begins as a character piece, examining the goals of and differences between each member of this family, but all of that eventually leads to a slew of conflicts that the filmmakers either don't want to or don't know how to explore in a meaningful way.

The center of the story belongs to the family's sons Carly and Mateo, respectively played by real-life brothers Mateo and Moises Arias. Carly is the golden son—smart and ambitious and knowing exactly what he wants to do with his life. Mateo, meanwhile, is aimless in his goals and clueless in his ambitions, as well as a perpetual troublemaker, trying to get attention—even the wrong kind—from under the lengthy shadow of his brother.

The two teens and their mother Nelly (Diane Guerrero) are living in Bogatá at the start of the story. They're about to move to Atlanta with the boys' father and Nelly's husband Ernesto (Wilmer Valderrama), who fled his life as a small-business owner in Colombia following extortion and threats from an unknown group (One assumes it's the guerillas fighting against the government, but the political context of the conflict is completely ignored here). Carly spends his final day in the country with his girlfriend (played by Kali Uchis), whose limited role becomes a precursor to the way most of the other characters in this story are underdeveloped and overlooked, and at a going-away party. Mateo spends it spraying graffiti, running from the cops, and blowing up a kid's playhouse, leaving his best friend to suffer the consequences.

These two brothers couldn't be any different, and that's the main takeaway of this story. We watch Carly, who loves heavy metal music, try to achieve his goal of gaining admission into a prestigious technical college, hoping to become an engineer at NASA, and we watch Mateo, who prefers hip-hop, get into more trouble, while finding new people with whom to aimlessly wander in this new place.

As a character study, the movie somewhat works early on. We get a sense of this family, as the parents support both of their sons, even if Ernesto has to give a well-meaning and softly spoken lecture to Mateo about responsibility and having a goal in life. Carly does well in school, making friends—with a side of obvious romantic tension—with a smart classmate (played by Ava Capri) and working on a practical model for a satellite that he believes could revolutionize communications. Mateo gets into a fight with the wealthy, racist school bully and, unlike his brother, starts a legitimate romance with a classmate (played by Ashley Jackson).

If we compare the movie itself to these two characters, it basically possesses some share of both—Carly's ambition and Mateo's aimlessness. Arango and Castrillon have big goals for this story, presenting various aspects of the experience of immigrants to the United States through this sort of everyday tale of a family trying to fit in and succeed. It's admirable and occasionally thoughtful, while the performances from main cast, especially the Arias brothers, give us a fine sense of these characters as more than representatives or symbols of some statement.

The conflict in the early stages feels real. The brothers clash over their different attitudes, outlooks, and aims. The parents try to keep the peace, although Ernesto shows a much harder hand when Mateo's own temper gets the better of him with the bully. The low stakes of this story make sense at first.

Everything starts to collapse, though, as the screenplay attempts to escalate those stakes, inadvertently making everything seem less significant. It turns out the family was the victim of a shady lawyer, putting their immigration status in jeopardy and leaving Nelly to try to find a solution. Mateo gets into trouble that can't be waved away without someone paying the price. In an especially convoluted subplot, Carly engages in a scheme to get his foot in the door at the college, impress a former-astronaut-turned-professor (played by Daniel Dae Kim), and even get his project directly to someone at NASA.

The story, which spent so much time simply observing these characters and their lives, suddenly has the additional weight of external conflicts and obstacles, leaving every character except the two brothers to become increasingly inconsequential or quickly disappear. Arango and Castrillon rush through the resolutions to all these concerns, making certain that the brothers learn some simple, obvious lesson from everything they have experienced. Everything and everyone else are left to linger somewhere, in some unknown condition, off-screen.

In trying to force a plot and purpose upon this ordinary story, the filmmakers end up drifting away from the movie's stronger elements. Blast Beat abandons a real story for too much fabricated conflict.

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