One thing I have come to realise over recent years is that there sure are a lot of generic spaghetti westerns out there. There are many which basically mine the exact same central ideas to the point that it is kind of hard distinguishing a lot of them from one another in your mind not long after you have seen them. Brother Outlaw, for better or for worse - it really depends largely on your standpoint with regard to this sub-genre – is essentially another of 'those' Italian westerns. It doesn't bring anything new to the table that I can think of but, at the same time, it was still decent enough and better than quite a few others that I have seen. Its story focuses on a sheriff who is accused wrongly of theft and sent to a hard labour camp. He is unexpectedly released when his outlaw brother tricks the authorities into setting him free. In true spaghetti style he quickly sets about getting a bit of revenge on the criminals who wronged him.
In all honesty I wasn't familiar with the director or any of the cast in this one. But it turned out that Tony Kendall is actually pretty good as the brooding central character. The direction was good enough I thought, if totally by-the-numbers. There is an opening stage coach chase, a bank robbery with copious zooms into a sign displaying the word 'bank' presumably just to double-check you are still paying attention and a requisite scene where our hero is captured, knocked about by laughing banditos and then saved by his partner. In other words, it's sort of more of the same from this sub-genre. I rate it ultimately as a pretty middling effort as it did keep my interest for the most part although, as seems to be increasingly often the case when I watch run-of-the-mill spaghetti westerns I found my mind drifting off in the latter quarter. Still, it was definitely an okay movie overall as far as this type of stuff goes.
