Stream It Or Skip It: ‘New Bandits’ On Prime Video, Where A Man Joins A Vicious Group Of Bandits That’s A Family Legacy

Bryan Cranston hasn’t cornered the market on stories where seemingly “good guys” are put into positions where their evil side comes out. A new series from Brazil takes the premise of shows like Breaking Bad or Your Honor and links that “good guy” up with a notorious crime family he thought he left behind as a boy.

NEW BANDITS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: In black and white, we see a funeral procession for Amaro Vaquiero, a noted Cangaceiro. We also see a boy running through the woods, and a girl asking where her brother Ubaldo is.

The Gist: Cut to the present day. We see a man strapped in the bed of a pickup truck. A woman in a motorcycle cuts off the convoy of trucks, points a gun at his head and demands to know why he’s even there.

One week earlier, that man, the same Ubaldo (Allan Souza Lima) who ran away from his father’s funeral twenty years prior, is in a bathroom changing out of his business clothes and into a military uniform. He tells someone on the phone that he just lost his job at a bank. He wears this uniform to visit his adoptive father in the hospital; his ailing father has no idea he was dishonorably discharged.

Because he has no way of paying for the care his father needs, he’s going to look into papers he found in his father’s home saying that he has an inheritance from his birth father, Amaro Vaqueiro, consisting of land in the northeast part of Brazil.

In the meantime, we see Dinora Vaquiero (Alice Carvalho) and her partner Limo (Pedro Lamin) searching an apartment for weapons. When they’re ambushed by someone there, her response is vicious, and she has no problem telling the man her name as she points a shotgun at him.

Ubaldo arrives in the small town where the land is, and finds out from the bank that it’s leveraged to the hilt. He can sell it to the bank and net some money or try his luck at auction. If he sells it, though, he needs the signatures of his sisters Dinora and Dilvânia (Thainá Duarte).

He goes to the ranch, and finds Dilvânia, who is silent. She’s amazed that her big brother is back in town after so many years, and checks for a birthmark on his belly to make sure it’s him. She seems receptive to having him visit, but Dinora feels much differently. As far as she’s concerned, he abandoned the family and he won’t dare sell the ranch out from under them.

Ubaldo then tries to forge his sisters’ signatures on the sales form, but the family is well known in town, and the banker lets Dinora know. In no uncertain terms, she tells him to get out of town and never come back, else she’ll take him out for good. She puts him in a car with Jeremias (Ênio Cavalcante), a top member of her gang, who finds it remarkable that Ubaldo doesn’t want to follow in his birth father’s footsteps. When he proposes to fellow gang member Sabiá (Adélio Lima) that Ubaldo stick around, Sabiá just says that Ubaldo is “trouble.”

Ubaldo has to wait around for about 12 hours for a morning bus back to São Paulo. At a stop, he goes to a bank to get some cash, and is caught up in a robbery. Two of the robbers are Jeremias and Sabiá. When some things go sideways and Jeremias gets shot, they take Ubaldo with them to rendezvous with Dinora and Lino.

This is where we come back to that opening scene when Dinora wants to know why Ubaldo is there. She gets ready to blow his brains out when he makes a proposal: As someone who used to work at a bank, he knows where they can make much bigger heists than the one they just pulled off.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? New Bandits (original title: Cangaço Novo) has a bit of a Breaking Bad element to it, mainly because Ubaldo never wanted to be a part of his father’s crime family, but now is forced into it. Though it does feel like he may have been born to be a Cangaceiro, no matter how much he protests.

Our Take: Created by Mariana Bardan and Eduardo Melo, New Bandits is an intriguing mix, mainly because we get two sides of a family dispute, with the family just happening to be the offspring of a notoriously vicious criminal.

There’s a bit of a role reversal in the series, where the “good guy” is male and the “bad guy” is female. And in the person of Dinorah Vaquiero, we have a pretty ruthless crime boss; she’s going to be Ubaldo’s rival through the series, mainly because she feels her brother betrayed the family in a way that she feels is unforgivable.

We’re also intrigued about how Ubaldo, who shied away from his criminal upbringing, manages to integrate himself into this gang of bandits. How long will there be doubt about his motives? Who will be loyal to Dinorah and who will align with Ubaldo? Just how much control does Dinorah have over her gang?

This is the potential of New Bandits. Of course, the danger is that these characters become one-note, but there are signs that these characters deal in shades of grey. We’re especially intrigued by Dilvânia, who seems to be much happier to see her brother than Dinorah does. We hope her character gets more time, and we see a lot more backstory about the family’s entire history.

Sex and Skin: Dinorah lounges naked after a victorious sex session with Lino.

Parting Shot: Ubaldo lies in the back of the truck, unconscious after being pistol whipped. We

Sleeper Star: Thainá Duarte as Dilvânia, mainly because her role is silent. She seems to be expressive enough to communicate well without words.

Most Pilot-y Line: The robbery scene was chaotic and confusing, and we’re not sure why the bandits wanted everyone’s shirts off. We also don’t know why they strapped a hostage to the hood of their truck like he was a hood ornament.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The first episode of New Bandits sets up a very interesting faceoff between estranged siblings, and in Dinorah we might just have one of the most vicious TV bad guys we’ve seen since Gus Fring.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.