Santo

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.

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!

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!

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.