Brazil, circa the 1910s: Cabeleira (Diogo Morgado) has been brought up by Seven Ears in the wild, who trained him to be a perfect shot, but kept him away from civilisation. Then one day, Seven Ears fails to come home, and eventually, Cabeleira goes looking for him. Trailing Seven Ears, Cabeleira reaches a city, enters a saloon, shoots dead three men in a scuffle that ensues ... and is paid a bounty for it, as the three were wanted criminals. He quickly learns the meaning of the pebbles he did get paid, as in, he could spend them on prostitutes. Trailing Seven Ears gets Cabeleira to M. Blanchard (Etienne Chicot), rich landowner and landgrabber of the region, in whose employ Seven Ears formerly was, and who's quick to hire Cabeleira as his replacement, seeing how quick he is with a gun. So Cabeleira becomes a feared assassin, killing landowners who refuse to sell to M. Blanchard - but not because he's evil at heart, just because he doesn't know any better.

The story here veers off to the story of a man whose wife and child got killed in a fire laid by the men of Four Eye, Blanchard's second-in-command, and how that man's road to vengeance almost gets Blanchard killed. This subplot also includes the killing of Soraia (Thaís Cabral), the first prostitute (and first woman) Cabeleira has ever had sex with - and it now turns out the two had a son, Antonio (Vitor Giudici), who is now forced upon Cabeleira to take care of. Thus Cabeleira returns to the shed in the wild where he was brought up to bring him up the same way. However, in the meantime, Blanchard has grown displeased with Cabeleira, so he sends a top hitman, Gringo (Will Roberts), after him, and now it's up to Cabeleira to first save Antonio, then himself ...

A greatly shot, atmospheric and suitably violent western - that's somewhat let down by an over-ambitious script that tries too hard to turn the thing into an epic. And that's a bit of a shame, as the film had such a promising start, telling a very archaic tale of the man brought up to be a killer - but then the revenge plot is introduced that features a whole new set of characters and that's just not tied into the main plot all that well, so much so that making one of the characters the mother of Cabeleira's son seems to be more of an afterthought than proper narrative build-up. And this makes the film, clocking in at a mere 99 minutes, feel rather on the long side. Now it's still entertaining to watch, and it's really well crafted, it's just a case of less would have been more.

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

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