There are those who view the dusty, sardonic works of Sergio Leone and feel that they’ve seen all they need to see when it comes to cruel yet cool world of the Spaghetti Western. However, if you choose to peek past the admittedly perfect trilogy he crafted with Clint Eastwood that undoubtedly did wonders for poncho sales, or his handsome epic that made Henry Fonda drop his nice guy act, there’s a whole world of alternative adventures involving stoic gunfighters, grimy bandits and more backstabbing than an entire season of The Traitors. A lot of them, thanks to the fact that the Italian film industry is involved, are blatant rip offs and clumsy cash ins, but there is also pure gold out there, hidden in unmarked graves to be fought over by men trying to make their way during some harsh times.
This brings us to Sergio Corbucci, who already had made a coffin-shaped mark on the genre with the magnificently gothic Django, but a few short years later, he delivered another cracker in the shape of The Mercenary, which manages to play in that familiar, Leone sandbox and almost actually win.
While watching a rodeo, stylish but greedy mercenary, Sergei “Polack” Kowalski, recognises one of the bull baiting clowns as Paco Roman, a man he had some pretty heavy history with only six months before and as he weighs up his options, he remembers back to when he met the guy in the first place and all the sizable ramifications their union caused.
Back then, Paco was one of the abused workers of a silver mine who, after getting pissed of finding dead lizards in their gruel, staged a rebellion against the owners only to be punished. However, after he escapes, Kowalski enters the picture and is hired to safely escorts the silver across the border, but finds his services no longer required when his even smarter dressed rival, Curly, kills the owners for information. When Kowalski arrives at the mine, he finds that Paco has returned with his rag tag band of revolutionaries and taken the place over which draws some unwanted attention from the army who started shelling the place.
During the chaos, Paco pleads with Kowalski to use his mercenary talents to help, which he does… for a price (the clue is in the title, people), but after the manage to turn the tide with the Polack’s strategy and a rather hefty machine gun, the would-be leader of a revolution decides to keep Kowalski around on a fat, juicy retainer in order to teach him how to run a full scale revolution with the aim to get rich.
However, with the forces of General Garcia gunning for them, the opportunistic Curly waiting in the wings and Kowalski’s desire to get paid no matter what all working against them, Paco soon finds himself actually believing in his own cause which is something that could be fatally bad for business.
With three conflicting characters who all carry shifting allegiances and a backdrop of the Civil War, you’d be forgiven for dismissing The Mercenary as just a cynical photocopy of The Good, The Bad And The Ugly; but while there are undeniable similarities (a smooth hero, dusty Mexican and cols hearted killer make up the lead trio) Corbucci manages to craft a sprawling epic that not only deals with big weighty themes and comes in under two hours, but he has fun with it as well. At first, the movie seems to relish creating a world where nothing, not even the fight against oppression, is done without some sort of selfish, ulterior motive as our three leads prove that they would probably sell out their own mothers if there was a buck in it for them.
The cast is lead by Django himself, Franco Nero, as the mercenary of the title who plays up the notion of the avarice fueled enigma to a magnificently entertaining degree. While somehow never lapsing into full parody, the Polack is a man so cool, so collected and so utterly unflappable, makes Seth Gecko seem like Jerry Lewis as his meticulous facial hair and trademark piercing eyes make him curiously resemble Pilou Asæk. But beyond this, the film has him reach such absurd levels of self confidence, you can’t wait to see what shit he’s going to pull next, whether it’s refusing to show Paco how to work a machine until he’s compensated during a gunfight, or the evermore hilarious list of things he chooses to nonchalantly light a match from that includes a dead man’s boot, the teeth of someone mid-conversation and even a hooker’s boob. Leone pulled off some audacious shot in his time, but nothing like that.
In comparison to Nero’s frosty cool, Tony Musante’s Paco seems to be the only one present saddled with an actual arc as he goes from lowly miner to full blown revolutionary and right back down again to rodeo clown, but while the Mexican characters in these sort of movies are usually portrayed as hygiene-starved bandits or sweaty examples of comic relief, Musante manages to fuse them all into one to make the actual lead of the film strangely vulnerable as he gradually becomes the actual leader he was originally pretending to be. Of course, he has some wobbles here and there, but then he has Giovanna Ralli’s fiery Columba to set him straight whenever the Polack’s demands get too excessive. In comparison, Jack Palance’s Curly is barely in the thing, but if anyone can do a lot with a little, it’s Palance and when he isn’t getting forced to walk through the dessert butt naked after a failed ambush, he’d goading his henchmen to stab a man with a pitchfork.
Not to be outdone by his cast, Corbucci not only gives them plenty to do, but he stages a fair few action sequences scattered with symbolism and a fair bit of visual verve. Having Paco have to undergo the humiliation of having to engage in a climactic quick draw to the death while still clad in his rodeo clown outfit is a work of damn genius and the larger scenes where the army rain pain down on our heroes are not only clear and easy to follow, but they involve such cool shit as Kowalski and Paco driving towards the enemy in a stolen car while firing a massive machine gun.
All this would be awesome enough, but to add a decidedly melodious cherry to the top of the cake is a score provided by Ennio Morricone himself that already is overwhelmingly familiar thanks to the fact that Quentin Tarantino repurposed it heavily for use in Kill Bill Vol. 2. However, while the backstabbing and bromance of Corbucci’s The Mercenary may not quite reach the artistic heights of Leone’s famous final entry in his seminal trilogy, it’s certainly just as fun and engrossing while never taking itself too seriously.
And if I have to say it again, then I will: Franco Nero casually lights a match off of a prostitutes breast and downplays it like a fucking pimp. Surely that’s mysterious, nihilistic western hero nirvana right there, people; what the hell more convincing do you need?
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