Santo

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 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.

Must be for the tiktok generation or something. So poorly written with mediocre acting. Save yourself the time...because this is absolutely not worth it. You keep on watching because you hope eventually there iwll be a good plot twist but it is so obvious who is Santa from the beginning. I wish I would get that bit of lifetime back.. I wonder what other series or movie this writer and director have created. This is even reason enough to cancel my netflix subscription... Another proof for pure garbage productions from netflix recently. I hated this series so much I even went out of my way to write this review.

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.

Many of the previous reviews describe this hot mess of a series. I don't want to waste any more of my time thinking about awful this eight part series is. It's too bad because the original idea was kind of interesting (namely a crossover between two countries). However, there are far too many holes in the plots. There are plot lines that don't really go anywhere and appear to be filler. The replaying the same scenes over and over again for no apparent reason is kind of strange. On top of that there is the sterotypical rouge dectective story -- he has problematic family life and goes out of his way against his superior's demands to solve the crime. It's so predictable...I could predict what episode he was going to get suspended!