La banda Grossi

I had the pleasure to watch this movie in a small cinema, this title seemed to come out of the blue: there hasn't been much advertising around. Well, wow! The story really caught me and suddently left me wanting to be one of those merciful, passionated yet violent outlaws. The music is very nice and certainly underlines the movie most important passages with graceful brushes: still it conveys the sense of loneliness and desperation these outlaws had to face while living a life out in the wild. It seemed reminiscent of some bluegrass-folk inspiration, sometimes even Neil Young. Cinematography is wonderful (I would just refine a couple of passages, but this doesn't detract at all from the overall score).

I have literally wasted two hours of my life watching this horrible, inconclusive mess where nothing ever happens. The first 15 minutes are misleading, because a somewhat decent cinematography and editing lead you into wanting to know what happens next. And what happens next? Nothing. The movie is 50% made of verbose, redundant dialogs, and 50% made of bearded guys taking infinite hikes in the mountains. You reach the end of the movie literally not knowing why these guys are so badly wanted by the police. In 2 hours they instigate a very brief shooting, they rob a house, and they kill two cops. That's all the action you get in a movie that's supposed to tell the story of blood-thirsty brigands who killed hundreds of people, looted villages and made every other possible crime. Even the political motive of the gang remains barely mentioned. You spend two hours watching these guys talk and go on mountain trails and you never know why they move or what they are precisely talking about. Furthermore, the dialogs are written in such a pompous way that farmers, shoemakers and other lower social class people that are supposed to barely know how to speak, are instead more well-spoken than poets or language scholars. From an acting standpoint, there are a couple of good actors, half a dozen of mediocre actors, and all the rest are just non-actors, cringey amateurs taken from the street, I guess. And nothing of the above can be justified by low-budget restrictions, since the number one fail is the screenplay. If you can't write two lines of decent, coherent screenplay , you definitely should keep away from daring to make a movie.

I have seen many western in my time, so it is hard for me to imagine a new way of doing this kind of film, however La Banda Grossi does do something new and it is impressive. I loved the way this film is directed. It is graceful and elegant and the final scene was really very memorable. Many of the shots are just lovely to look at.

Something I did not enjoy so much was that a handful of very stereotyped soldiers are introduced at one point and I found them a bit irritating.

Simply a brilliant indie movie to watch so far.

A fantastic film about an episode of the Italian brigandage, with great attention to details. The historical period interested leads the viewer to relive an American western story.

It's very hard to put in words how bad this movie is. I wouldn't even call it a "movie". I was tricked by some reviewer here on IMDB who talked about this pile of dirt like it almost was a Sergio Leone movie, and in the end I wasted 2 hours of my life. I'm writing this review hoping no one will do the same mistake. This "movie" makes no sense and has no rythm. The acting is terrible, the screenplay is beyond terrible. "Amateurish" would be a fantastic compliment. Avoid it like the plague.