Single father Pedro (Valentín Trujillo) moves to the big city with his son Pedroico looking for work. His luck turns bad nearly immediately as a drunk cop slams crashes his car into a newsstand and injures Pedro's boy. While the kid is in the hospital, Pedro is at the police station where the cop files a false report saying the kid ran out in front of his car. Pedro refuses to sign the report and socks the cop in the face, sending him headfirst into a glass water cooler. Damn. He gets 6 months for the assault, during which time Pedroico runs away from the hospital and becomes a street kid. After assaulting his crooked lawyer, Pedro is given a 5 year stretch and befriends incarcerated cop Carlos (Rodolfo de Anda) after saving him during a failed weight room shanking. 5 years later, Pedro is released and Carlos gets him a job on the force. Apparently things are different in Mexico as cops who did time just get their jobs back and they can recruit ex-cons too. Of course, you can tell where this is going as Pedroico is now a streetwise kid resorting to a life of crime. And guess who is on Pedro's team? The cop who ran over his son. Mucho dramatico!
This was Trujillo's second directorial effort and is good stuff. It is obviously heavy on the melodrama, but I give him points for not going for the happy ending that Hollywood has trained us to expect. There are some good action scenes, including a completely superfluous assault on terrorists in a mansion. Notorious Video Asia released this in an English dubbed version in their Thug City Chronicles DVD set. A word of warning as it is taken from a VHS master that has a tracking problem about 20 minutes in. The bad news? From that point on, the audio is screwed up for the rest of the movie. Truly one of the worst DVDs I've ever had to sit through.
