Made for Netflix movies in general, and Westerns in particular, seem to get short shrift from IMDb fans when casting their votes. Same story here, though some of the reviewers as I write this found the film to be excellent. I'm in the plus camp, I thought this was a decent Western, if that's what you can call it, because the action takes place in the Pernambuco District of Brazil in a 1910 flashback story. It's told by a modern day, young gunslinger of about twenty years old, but we don't find that out until the end of the story.
A few of the negative comments on the picture state that it jumps around and it's hard to follow. I've said it before and I'll say it again, some effort to pay attention to what's going on goes a long way. It helps too, at least in my case, to keep tabs on the characters as they show up with some notes, so I can keep a clear head when I write these reviews.
The story takes one through three generations of hired guns who, depending on their particular circumstances, wind up on either the right or the wrong side of the prevailing tracks. None of the principal players are 'good guys' in the classic Western genre sense, they're status may be determined by who they're working for at the time. Because the Frenchman, Monsieur Blanchard (Etienne Chicot), has a string of hired guns to take out entire families if they don't sell out to him, he's the nominal villain of the story. However when his main henchman, the self named Cabeleira (Diogo Morgado) refuses to kill women and children, Blanchard hires his last in line 'go-to' guy, The Gringo (Will Roberts), to take out Cabeleira.
By now I've seen and reviewed close to a thousand Westerns, so at some point I take the violence as a matter of course. For some, the blood work in this film may seem particularly violent but it's not over the top, and is principally focused against bad men doing bad things. There's a particularly evil looking 'cangaceiro' called Corisco/The Blonde Devil that looks like Satan himself who I don't see listed in the credits. That guy was just plain rattlesnake ugly.
Anyway, I thought the film was well done and the Brazilian setting, novel as it was, played like a rugged spaghetti Western. The finale wasn't much of a twist ending if one follows the story, but it was still cool the way Antonio took out the Miranda Brothers. Departing somewhat from his predecessors, Antonio (Vitor Giudici) rode off with not one, but two young disciples who would no doubt grow up as part of a long line of condemned men to take up the role of hired guns.
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