O Amuleto de Ogum

We sent this to Cannes? Wish I could be there with that audience to see the reaction from all the foreign viewers. I'm somewhat ashamed to know about such fact because it's an embarrassing film to show to an intellectual with high expectations audience who at the same festival had the pleasure to see "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore", "The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser" and "The Passenger". Sorry, but Nelson Pereira dos Santos' experiment doesn't get near the likes of Scorsese, Herzog or Antonioni. "Memórias do Cárcere" was a huge triumph of his but Cannes didn't include it in the line-up for the Palme D'or. I can't have the facts of that time, that's fine but where's the contemporary voices who watch this film today and say this is a good movie? Right, Youtube comments that doesn't qualify the film in any valuable way. Goes from good to great, to nice and cool, they say. But they're not here so you get the real deal according to what I saw.

It's cheaper than cheap filmmaking at its lowest from the very beginning, a lousy opening scene with three thugs trying to rob a blind man, who somehow overpowers them by telling a story about a simple man with a unique power: he has a closed body and nothing can't hit or hurt him. That's what we follow from then on, the story of Gabriel (Ney Santanna) who gets used by a crime lord (Joffre Soares) to commit several crimes, at my view quite idiotic because he goes to kill folks who don't show any resistance, they're always taken by surprise and at no point they shoot the "power" guy. How do we know he's really unbreakable? We're told that Gabriel was protected by orixás, when his mother asked them for protection after the killing of his father, and that protection comes from an amulet he constantly wears, hence "O Amuleto de Ogum" ("Ogum's Amulet").

The previous mentioned moments are actually quite engaging, easy to follow but strange to accept and digest. What turns the movie around is when Gabriel is targeted by his boss and crime colleagues because he's getting too visible during the crimes, making mistakes and attracting attention to the group. He's very young, awfully impressionable and doesn't know exactly how to react to the luxury, the cars and the women in his life (he's far from smart but knows how to shoot and kill and not feel a thing about it). So, how can you terminate someone who can't be terminated? It's plans after plans from the mobster to execute Gabriel, a disastrous mess after another and too bad the movie goes the same way as well, not knowing how to properly make us connect to such a story. Pereira dos Santos doesn't have any worthy message to bring with this junk. It's just an entertaining story? It's about the power true believers in religion have over fake religious people, who tend to use it to obtain power? Or a statement that power can be trusted to people who don't have the responsibility to use them? Whatever that message was, it was certainly lost on me.

And the vessels that were supposed to carry the movie haven't even got the chance to set sail, sunk from scene one, and those are the actors. Santanna is the director's son and what uncharismatic, wooden and strange performer he is. Not entirely his fault, the character he plays is poorly developed all around: hero, anti-hero, villain or the least menacing guy from that group? Hard to know and I didn't care. The rest of the cast goes the same way, all reading cue cards or trying to look important in front of camera. The great Joffre Soares is an exception with his powerful and believable presence as the main villain. He's slightly over-the-top but in a movie like this, it's not a bad thing to do.

Though flawed as a drama, ridiculous a comedy and amateurish in almost all accounts, "O Amuleto de Ogum" reserved some good moments, such as the sequence where Gabriel is confronted by a colleague during a lame fight where he accidentally dropped some food on the guy's shirt. The guy shoots Gabriel several times and nothing happens, and the crowd goes to their knees, claiming a miracle. Great sequence. Also worthy of mention, a few torture scenes involving police brutality against criminal teens, which took me by surprise not much for the shock value but one must consider the film's release back in the heated years of the military regime, which always denied torture ever happened in their prisons yet those scenes escaped without censorship, so that's something to be amazed from a film of that era.

Final and simple verdict: a waste and a mess. 3/10

This film would be loved for Tarantino! Violence, mob guys, exploitation and...afrodescendent Religion!

Film is about a young guy named Gabriel who is out to prove himself to this huge crime boss. He gets himself hired as a henchman doing odd hits and various killings, all in the name of making his bones for the crime boss. Guy then discovers that he actually has the ability to withstand bullets. People in the film keep saying that he has "a closed body" meaning that bullets can't penetrate him. The crime boss instead of seeing this as an amazing thing to have in a henchman decides instead that this guy needs to be gotten rid of, so he spends the movie trying to plot various ways of trying to bump off the apparently bulletproof Gabriel. There's some talk about Gabriel's ability stemming from this amulet he wears, which causes the crime boss to want to learn all about the order of the religion that the amulet comes from (The amulet was a symbol of the religious following that Gabriel's mother follows and that Gabriel grew up in as a child.) The crime boss ends up engaging in several witch doctor like practices to try and emulate Gabriel's bulletproof ability to no avail.

This film honestly strangely enough reminded me of X Men Origins Wolverene--the first stand alone Wolverene film. In that film, Wolverene becomes the employee of this shady company who spends all this time and money trying to make him the perfect killing machine, only to turn on him almost instantly when it looks as if his power is too much for the company to feel they can control. Wolverene then spends the rest of the movie being hunted down by various agents of the company and dispatches them all. That's literally more or less the plot of this movie--just substitute the ability to not be hit by bullets for adamentium claws. This film however much like that first Wolverene film despite a couple of interesting touches, does not really sustain interest tho, in that the film soon becomes quite repetitive with scene after scene after scene basically boiling down to a bunch of hit men sent by the crime boss try and fail to strike down or get the better of Gabriel, who just cannot be killed. Honestly, a little of this goes a long way, and some slight variation or even explanation would have been appreciated. Its not that its a terrible film, just that once the story is set up, the film does not really go anywhere with it except for again scene after scene of people trying to kill Gabriel only to end up killed by Gabriel. Almost again exactly what happened in that first Wolverene film. OK I guess.

Very interesting movie by master director Nelson Pereira dos Santos, which overlaps different genres and issues. It is a gangster film, with scenes that remind Westerns too, but it is also a movie on Northeastern migration to Southeast (what ia a quite important social issue in Brazil), violence in big towns, lives outside touristic areas in Rio de Janeiro, and obviously African Brazilian culture and religion. It is also a film in the border of fantasy and fantastic realism: the idea of a "closed body", there is, a person protected by the Orishas from any harm, is the core subject in the whole film. The opening scene with a blind storyteller telling his offending robbers what would be the movie story was also a quite smart way to begin...