Virtually every moment of Aluisio Abranches' Brazilian revenge thriller The Three Marias has been pulled from one of world cinema's lower shelves. The plot has the tawdry kill-or-be-killed baseness of a '70s drive-in underworld saga: Marieta Severo's husband and two sons are murdered by one of her spurned lovers, so she asks the title characters–her three daughters Júlia Lemmertz, Maria Luisa Mendonça, and Luíza Mariani–to seek out a trio of hit men to avenge the family. They hire a woman-hating snake-handler (Enrique Díaz), a knife-wielding vigilante cop (Tuca Andrada), and a Bible-thumping convicted serial killer (Wagner Moura), who collectively could have stepped out of a Hong Kong martial-arts epic. The killers' swift journey from employment to assassination is scored by an ambient soundtrack reminiscent of an '80s made-for-cable skin-flick, shot in dusty rural locations that recall Sergio Leone's spaghetti Westerns, and dressed up with camera moves, montages, and timeline-juggling as stylish as those of any recent pulpy American independent film. But is it lurid enough? Abranches and screenwriters Heitor Dalia and Wilson Freire toss in the occasional beheading and disembodied eyeball, but The Three Marias is clanked-up by an overemphasis on destiny and divine retribution. The scripture-spouting and portentous tone weigh down what might work better if it were lean and sleazy. A series of third-act complications provides much-needed narrative surprise, but until then, The Three Marias is a disappointingly flavorless genre exercise. Even those brief, sharp turns become repetitive after the first one comes along, and the movie ends just as it's starting to loosen up. The Three Marias has style and draws strength from its exotic locale, but Abranches and company's rote pilferage doesn't take into account that escapist exploitation is supposed to be fun.