A Barrel Full of Dollars (Demofilo Fidani, 1971)

4/10
Title aside, this Spaghetti Western borrows liberally from Leone (a chiming pocketwatch, a green poncho) but does feature a couple of neat if ultimately useless subversions (the good guy, the Nevada Kid, wears all black; the bad guy wears the Eastwood-esque poncho). Jeff Cameron is bland and uninteresting as the Nevada Kid and Klaus Kinski is great but criminally underused as the bad guy Hagen (most of the film is spent chasing Hagen's number two, Tamayo). There are a couple of good shoot-outs but the problem is that it's all too easy for the heroes. In the final battle, after all of Hagen's henchmen have been mowed down, Hagen fires a multitude of shots at the Nevada Kid, which all miss. Hagen steps out from his cover for a second and he's instantly shot dead. We all know the good guys are going to win but come on, at least make it interesting.