Gaúcho Negro

Embarassing bad acting (particularly Adriana's father and the four camp thugs, but also Letícia Spiller is much worse here than in her later career), completely undevelopped characters and a sometimes chaotic script. If you are looking for Zorro-like vigilante Black Gaucho fighting mean landowners, as expected for the title, have in mind that the hero does not appear very much, although the action scenes are well filmed. Half of the film seems to be an exhibition of a Southern Brazilian folk festival instead of a narrative feature movie. The rest of the story is considerably a chaos, mixing a shallow love affair, folk celebrity Gaúcho da Fronteira and a clumsy friend of him wandering around, and an worried teacher's concerns. Four of TV superstar Xuxa Meneghel's assistant teens named "paquitas" and "paquitos" had more (Letícia Spiller) or less (Egon Junior) important roles (Juliana Baroni and Cláudio Heinrich lay somewhere in the middle, and Xuxa herself has a cameo in the end). The background secret story (and identity) of the Black Gaucho is predictable, but not properly bad. With more focus and development a better outcome would have been possible.