‘Brigands: The Quest for Gold’ Netflix Series Review - A Pile of Rubbish

Film critic Matt Zoller Seitz recently wrote an article titled "It's OK For Movies to Just End," in which he talks about the most common problem infecting most movies nowadays - They don't know how to end. The studios are always looking for ways to expand their franchise, universe, multiverse, or whatever, and as a result, you get end-credit scenes acting as teasers or advertisements regarding the upcoming installments. We have been seeing sequels for a long time, but in the current environment, this need to expand every other film into something bigger - and not necessarily better - reeks of desperation. And the issue is not merely limited to films. Many web shows, too, end up promising more seasons even when they could have wrapped everything up in the first season itself.

Beneath all this constant churning of lifeless mediocrity lies a machine that just wants to keep you online. This is why you get shows like Brigands: The Quest for Gold and Fake Profile. Yes, many other names could be added to this list, but I chose Fake Profile because Brigands left me as exasperated, exhausted, and mad as that 2023 Spanish thriller romance. The most important (and worst) thing common between Fake Profile and Brigands is that they render their story meaningless. Dare to follow the plot threads, and your brain will get tangled up in a mess. Nothing seems to matter. Everything looks inconsequential.

Brigands uses something like a "story" as an excuse to let its actors pose in costumes. The actors take out their guns, utter, "A pact is a pact," talk about gold, and after every five minutes, realize they have been betrayed. All of this is depicted most dully as if Brigands is informing other terrible Netflix shows that the standard can be further degraded in terms of quality. A training montage just consists of a character posing with a rifle. A little girl encounters a boy, tells him to come back for her, and gives him a kiss on his cheek - all this occurs within three minutes or less (character or relationship development be damned). There are two comic reliefs in Brigands, and they are never even used as comic reliefs. At one point, both of them get arrested, leading you to wonder what you missed.

I obviously didn't go back to check. I never cared about anyone. The screen is completely blank - it's devoid of feelings. You don't sense drama, romance, or even violence when two groups of people openly fire at each other outside a church. Brigands is so riddled with incompetence that it fails to tantalize the audience with cheap sex. The naked bodies are as unstimulating as the hanging bodies. In one of the episodes, Ciccilla's (Ivana Lotito) gang suspects there is a traitor among them, yet you never experience any sense of paranoia, and the traitor's identity, when revealed, doesn't leave you gasping.

There is a scene in Brigands where Filomena (Michela De Rossi) makes a bet with a man in which the one who loads their gun quickly wins. Filomena loses, but later, she loads her gun rapidly and saves a kid. A better series might have established some connection between the two scenes (it could have also highlighted it). Here, they simply appear and disappear without doing anything. You can repeat this line for every scene in this series. Brigands feels so meaningless that you wonder why so many people wasted their time making it.

Filmmakers today are constantly worried about losing the attention of the audience. They don't want them to shift their focus away from the big screen to look at their small screen. Then there are shows like Fake Profile and Brigands that force you to look at your mobile because they don't have a creative bone in their body. A stupid meme like the one where you are told to look between two keys looks more interesting in front of shows like Brigands (or Briganti, in Italian).

Final Score- [1/10]
Reviewed by - Vikas Yadav
Follow @vikasonorous on Twitter
Publisher at Midgard Times