Santo

I came to the reviews hoping that someone else had made sense of this. But with only three reviews I'm out of luck. I'm halfway through episode 2 and I have no idea what's going on. All I can say is the characters seem interesting, the dubbing is actually very good considering it's Netflix, the atmosphere is consistently drab and unappealing. The story is so convoluted jumping around so much you don't know who's who, who's the good guy, who's the bad guy, why this guy was in the gutter, did they find the boy? But right away I think I know who Santo is, so I'm probably not going to finish watching this. Oh and there's some weird visual effects where it's almost like they tried to do some sort of a Blair Witch fx but different. At first it's interesting but it has no purpose in other words it doesn't come right before something or right after something it's just kind of random. It would be like having a musical crescendo despite that nothing happened.

This mess of six episodes held promise for two episodes and then the train got so derailed that the wreck that followed could never be put back together again. First the positives, why there are 3 stars, direction was decent, acting ok, photography above average, acting good, dubbing decent. Now the other side, editing was so bad you couldn't keep up half the time, they constantly replayed scenes and finally you got that perhaps the character was dreaming them (?) or did they just need filler, or...your guess is as good as any. The title character of ultimate evil, when revealed was a bit anti-climatic, you probably figured it out and the character really did not fit into the supposed history of the Santo legend, unless...and I wont give that away if you waste 6 hours watching it you will see what I mean. Also, we have plot lines hanging, new ones rising, all to add weight to a story that already can't carry the burden. We have our two male leads having the opportunity to do the right thing and just staring into space as the moment slips by. People acting as no reasonable person would except in a screenwriters brain. Sorry, this series is just bad in so many, many ways and then they throw in the stupidest cliff hanger at the end to try to hook you into another season!!!! Wow, the gaul! Skip this one, I suffered through it for you!

The subject of the series is appealing and the Spanish-Brazilian collaboration full of potential but the series is not worth the time. Very poor direction, with unnecessary jumps from past to present and back, from one location to anotherand back - the movie is a head-scratching mess.

There are a lot of story lines left unaddressed and numerous characters left unexplained.

The acting is decent for how chaotic the characters have been drafted. In general, it feels like the director went for shock and gory instead of dramatic coherence.

Unless you want to waste six hours of your life, don't even start it.

This really was a mess. It started off promisingly but then tapered down to a confusing farrago of nothing. At times, the scriptwriters clearly couldn't think of how to fill the six hours they'd been commissioned to write so they repeated scenes from earlier episodes - the fourth episode was dreary filler showing almost exactly what we'd seen before. It wasn't even done from the perspective of a different character. This pattern repeated itself on the final episodes too.

I'd worked out who Santo was by the end of episode four. It was impossible not to have done. However, even though it was obvious, it was ludicrously at odds with both what the character was meant to have been and the storyline, such as it was.

I'm the meantime, we go past inexplicable situations where people grass on each other for no reason, fail to kill baddies, go loopy and attract the cops' attention only to die, express devotion to a mythical father.

The two cops mentioned in the IMDB synopsis are mavericks, of course and ignore the law in their own ways. Both suffer for this.

The most unbelievable theme is that of voodoo/Satanism from old Dahomey being the glue that bound the drug smugglers together to the point of dying for the cause. Even the usage of psychedelics as shown couldn't have engendered the scenarios postulated here.

There's going to be a second season, gawd help us, after the predictable cliffhanger. I shan't be watching.

I gave it a shot because not only do I love all the countries it is set in, but the cast is generally speaking great too.

However... what a waste of talented actors. Everyone involved in this project deserved a better story, I'm not even sure how they prepared for their roles because nothing makes sense. It's impossible to follow what's going on. And as much as I love Victoria Guerra, her accent was weak and they could have easily casted a Brazilian actress instead. Unless it turns out in the end that her true nationality all along wasn't Brazilian - I wouldn't know because I just couldn't torture myself to watch the whole thing.

I'm always happy to see Portuguese/Spanish series on Netflix and wish there were more, but they need to amp up the quality and make justice to the talent they hire.