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Blood & Gold review: Is the Netfix movie worth a watch?

marie hacke blood and gold
Is Netflix movie Blood & Gold any good?Netflix

There’s lots of blood, lots of gold and plenty of inventive deaths in Netflix’s new German-language movie Blood & Gold, a spaghetti-western-style flick set at the end of World War II that owes a debt not just to movies like The Magnificent Seven and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, but also Quentin Tarantino’s acclaimed Inglourious Basterds.

If you loved Tarantino’s flick, you’ll find much to like in this smartly paced movie that begins with a deserting German soldier named Heinrich (Barbarians’ Robert Maaser) being chased across the countryside by a group of SS officers. They capture him and hang him, but leave without making sure he’s dead first.

That’s because they have other things on their mind – they’re heading to the nearby village of Sonnenberg to search for a stash of gold bars they believe were hidden by a Jewish family in their home before they fled.

It’s lucky for poor Heinrich that they are distracted, as he’s still alive (though suffering from major neck ache) when he’s cut down by Elsa (Marie Hacke, whom Outlander fans may recognise as Petronella Mueller).

blood gold
Netflix

She lives on the outskirts of the village with her brother Paule (Simon Rupp), who has a learning disability.

Of course, the nasty Nazis aren’t far away. They are led by Alexander Scheer’s Lieutenant Colonel, who hams it up like he’s a long-lost sibling of Raiders of the Lost Ark’s villain Toht. He and his soldiers have taken over Sonnenberg and are threatening to start shooting the villagers one by one until they tell them where the gold is hidden.

Heinrich and Elsa, meanwhile, are on their own mission to rescue Paule, who’s been snatched by the bad guys, and find themselves heading into Nazi-filled Sonnenberg, too.

With some of the villagers knowing very well where the gold is, the threads of the plot come together to culminate in a bloody showdown as everyone starts suspecting and shooting each other, and people – Nazis, villagers, you name it – die in various inventive ways (including one gleefully gruesome death-by-gold-bar).

blood gold
Netflix

It is all very Tarantino-esque (though with less humour and more hand grenades) with a Western-style climax, numerous disposable characters and destruction a-plenty throughout.

Maaser is suitably chiselled and determined as the male lead, but the film belongs to two of the actresses on screen – Jördis Triebel as Sonja, a kick-ass villager who you wouldn’t want to mess with, and Marie Hacke, whose tough farmer’s daughter is the heart of the movie.

Even when the plot gets predictable (which it does), she’s worth watching, and her Elsa is as tough, strong, brutal and watchable as any of Tarantino's iconic movie characters.

Blood & Gold is out now on Netflix.

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