Over the span of its five installments, the Sartana managed to put together a western anti-hero who had two noticable attributes: The first was a series of fantastically overblown titles that summed up the exact type of Spaghetti Western pulp you were about to see; but the second was something that actually proved that Sartana was a little different from your average gunslinger. If Eastwood’s The Man With No Name was a gritty con man; Franco Nero’s Django was a tragic, gothic avenger and Sabata was a goofy, Roger Moore/James Bond type, then Sartana was almost a kind of film noir detective, born into the wrong century and constantly finding himself in the middle of life or death mysteries that would either end in a pile of gold, or a bullet.
With his fifth and final film, Light The Fuse… Sartana Is Coming (a somewhat conservative title compared to his other films), it seems that director Giuliano Carnimeo and star Gianni Garko have got the series down cold as they deliver another bullet riddled conundrum for our cold-eyed hero to unravel.
Sartana rides into the town of Sandy Creek and immediately stirs up a bit of a fuss when he wastes no time plugging three corrupt law men and then transports their still warm bodies to the Everglades Penitentiary to turn himself in. What on Earth has gotten into a man who generally considers himself a honest man (unless gold is concerned) and why would he allow himself to be imprisoned in such a shit hole where prisoners are known to be tormented constantly and a desperate plea for water will most likely get you micturated on.
Of course, Sartana always has some sort of bafflingly complex plan up his tailored sleeve and we soon find that his murder spree was only a ploy to get closer to Granville, a man who pulled off a job for a hefty pile of gold, but who was allegedly double crossed and left to rot in a prison that has all the charm of a Vietnamese POW camp. However, after Sartana busts them both out, this latest quest for pre-stolen gold quickly starts to get more complex by the moment. You see, the nature of the double cross was so convoluted, there’s a clutch of other people who believe to gold is rightfully theirs and will stop and nothing to get it. There’s the dusty outlaw, Monk and his rather sizable army who coughed up two million dollars in counterfeit money for an exchange; there’s the corrupt sheriff Manassas Jim whose brother was killed during the original double cross; there’s Sartana and Granville, obviously and it wouldn’t be a western mystery without some sort of conniving woman in the mix.
With his big brain working overtime and a selection of bizarre gadgets at his disposal, Sartana gets to work deducing where the gold has actually been stashed while forging fake alliances here there and everywhere – but can his attempt to play everyone off with one another possibly pay off, or will his payment this time be in lead?
When you get to the fifth movie in any franchise, you’re bound to see one of two things come into effect: the original concept has been kicked to death in order to score a buck and the series has wildly lauched itself over the shark in order to compensate, or the filmmakers have managed to crystallise and streamline the series down to what works, leading to a more polished entry that plays to the franchises strengths. Thankfully for long time fans of the cerebal gunslinger, Light The Fuse… Sartana Is Coming proves to very much sit in the latter category and probably provides the franchise with one of its most solid entries. Both Carnimeo and Garko had made a few of these by now and so had their shit pretty much locked off, but while the whole “Sartana searches for gold while getting a bunch of villains to chase their tails” plot is about a well worn as the floor mat of a 70s taxi cab, the filmmakers had gotten so used to telling it, it moves along at a thrillingly zippy pace.
Garko in particular has managed to get his character down, keeping the once-distracting mustache, but adding a bit more warmth the the title character who becomes far more likable than his formerly smug demeanor might suggest. Oh, he still shoots anyone who looks at him funny and his unending desire for gold might be something a psychologist probably should look into (the guy has a snappy wardrobe and insanely weird gadgets – he obviously isn’t lacking in funds), but there’s something more human about him in this film that makes his insane prep time and perfect predictions not quite as annoying as they could be.
The mystery aspect is handled well too, and while I was watching this movie it finally hit me: if Tarantino could bang up an unofficial Django reboot for modern audiences, why couldn’t someone look into revamping Sartana too. I mean, there isn’t exactly a whole lot of Western-Noir out there and as it’s been proved that audiences like a good puzzle thanks to the continuing adventures of Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc and Kenneth Brannagh’s Hercule Poirot, why couldn’t we get a new slew of tangled mysteries for our dapper gunslinger to unlock? In fact, the whole framework of the movie is perfect for it with a whole bunch of eccentric backstabbers lined up for our hero to thwart, outwit, or deal with in order to stay one step ahead. In fact, Carnimeo has got the knack for this so buttoned down, he obviously is now having fun with the whole concept enough to get pretty damn weird.
Other gunslinger’s obviously have their own bags of tricks and one of the more famous of these was the sight of Franco Nero’s original Django opening the trusty coffin he drags around behind him to reveal that he keeps a gatling gun inside. However, Sartana has something far more absurd in store when he challenges an approaching horde of thugs with… an organ. That’s right, as a slew of hardened killers bares down in him, our hero starts tinkling the ivories – only to reveal that his tricked out musical instrument shoots mortars out of the outer pipes and sprays machine gun fire out of the middle ones.
Is it absolutely ridiculous? Well, yeah – but it’s no more absurd than him having a bunch of wind up toys that also double as bombs and at times you have to wonder why out gold-hungry hero has an armoury right out of the Batman Villain Big Book Of Gadgets.
However, as straight up stupid as it is, it’s somehow far less obnoxious than how goofy the Sabata films got, plus it’s genuinely hilarious to watch as dozens of grizzled banditos get wiped off the face of the earth by a man frantically tinkering with his organ.
So maybe complex mysteries, cartoonish gadgets and a highly enigmatic lead may not have been enough to make Sartana a household name among western fanatics; but for arguably the most solid entry of a surprisingly fun franchise, Light The Fuse… Sartana Is Coming manages to set off enough fireworks to keep fans of the more Spaghetti brand of gunslinging more than happy. In fact, it should leave Sabata and the endless Django rip offs sweating bullets…
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