Watch Adiós, Sabata For Free

To me, this movie is perfection.

So much average

People are voting emotionally.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

I saw this Yul Brynner-starring spaghetti western under the title ADIOS SABATA, even though it has nothing to do with the two Lee Van Cleef-starring SABATA films. It's not as good as the first Van Cleef film but better than the second. The coolest thing about this movie is seeing Yul Brynner in a wicked '70s set up complete with black costume, open shirt, and the like. Brynner's name is Indio Black in the original, Sabata in the version attempting to tie it in to the Van Cleef series.Once again the plot centres around a gold shipment and efforts by rival parties to get their hands on it. Brynner sort of moves in and out of the story and takes care of a bunch of soldiers and henchmen along the way. The Mexican revolutionaries are posited as the 'good' characters in this film; perhaps the Italians identified with them better given that this was shot in Spain. Care is taken to make the main bad guy an Austrian rather than American. The film is well shot and written, and proves an entertaining example of the spaghetti western genre.

Although it lacks the usual great roster of star support players (the Pedro Sanchez part was obviously tailor-made for Gian-Maria Volonte, while Gerard Herter lacks the personality and the charisma that someone like Gert Frobe would have brought to the role), this movie is also even more unusual in that it lacks any female role whatever (aside from Caterina Dalin's brief uncredited spot as a saloon girl). Yul Brynner is capably smooth as Sabata, and we loved Gianni Rizzo's delightfully rotund villain. Also worthy of note is Sal Borghese, who has certainly an unusual method of dispatching opposition. All told, what we have here is an entertaining, expensively produced western, aided by a fine Bruno Nicolai music score (which would be impossible for a late- coming patrons to distinguish from Morricone), with lots of shooting, shouting, dynamiting and destruction, all filmed on natural locales. Director Gianfranco Parolini likes to get a bit too close to the action for my taste, and the color photography tends to be a but grainy, but these are minor irritations.

This is not really a Sabata film, but often Italian westerns pretended to be sequels just to get unwitting customers to come to see the films*. For example, Franco Nero's "Django" was very successful so practically every Italian film producer brought out a Django film but with a different leading man--and a completely different plot! Here, cashing in on the Sabata craze (small as it was), a non-Sabata film starring Yul Brynner is suddenly a Sabata film thanks to dubbing! In fact, originally, Brynner's character was called 'Indigo Black'. I checked and there were seven Sabata films--only two which are REAL Sabata films with Lee Van Cleef. The rest, like "Adios Sabata" are just rip-offs. So is this a BAD rip-off or a decent and watchable rip-off? Read on to see...The plot of this film is close to that of a real Sabata film in that although he looks mean and shoots people by the score, this incarnation finds him doing this in order to help the Mexican Civil War of 1867. Now that doesn't mean he won't take a percentage for himself as well! A percentage of what you may ask....GOLD. It seems an evil (but very stylish) Austrian colonel is shipping gold--gold which could be used by the revolutionaries to buy weapons. However, Sabata isn't alone in this quest--he's taking along a fat guy, two VERY strange acrobats and a pretty-boy named Ballentine--who you KNOW is up to no good.As far as Italian westerns go, this theme is VERY common--though most of the time the hero is helping the anti-Diaz forces of the Mexican Civil War of the 1910s. This one is set much earlier and has to do with getting rid of the imposed leader, Maximillian. Regardless, this one is reasonably entertaining, full of insanely good shots and has a touch of humor. Worth seeing but not a particularly novel film...except when it comes to one of the acrobats. His skill is handling a very large ball bearing kind of like a hacky sack--which he then hurls with his foot at people with deadly accuracy! Ha...worth seeing just to see this guy in action. ball bearing guy*The same spirit of intellectual dishonesty was also rampant in Asian films after the death of Bruce Lee. Many supposedly new and recently discovered Lee films flooded the market--starring folks such as Bruce Li or consisting of home movies of Lee or outtakes from his films interspersed with a double wearing sunglasses! These films were ALL horrible--whereas a few of the Italian knockoffs were actually watchable. Plus, at least the Italian films had cool music.

This time Sabata helps some Mexican revolutionaries steal gold for their people and take down some corrupt officials in the process. He is helped by a con man named Valentine, even though Valentine isn't exactly trying to help anyone but himself.First of all this wasn't meant to be a sequel to Sabata - it is called Indio Black: you know what you are a son of a ... It had different characters and was actually a lot different, but they ultimately changed a few things and made it a sequel or at least promoted it as one. Cleef had took on a role in The Magnificent Seven sequel made famous by Bryner and Bryner took on this role made famous by Cleef.There is a lot of changes here. About the only thing the same is the black clothes, but Bryners suit is way different and his style is different. He does carry the little pistol with bullets in the butt, but he also carries a Winchestor with a nice magazine always with a bullet short for his cigar.Frank Kramer is back doing his beautiful direction and also with his co-writing partner Renato Izzo. The composer is different and I like it better even though it doesn't sound completely original, it's almost cliché, but I liked it.Acting wise of course Bryner replaces Cleef, but all the rest of the characters are someone different if they made it back at all. Pedro Sanchez is a different guy as is Gianni Rizzo and a few others. Alley cat was replaced by a similar character in here, only now a dancing Mexican fills the shoes.This movie was less original, had slower parts and just not nearly as fun or exciting as the first - I give it 5/10 stars.