This review originally ran Sept. 6, 2022, for the film’s world premiere at the Venice Film Festival.
You might be interestedcanjudge a film by its title. Take into account “Dead for a Dollar:” It certainly sounds like a Western, doesn’t it? The “dollar”Some of the most iconic songs in the genre might be brought to mind, but the “dead”It promises at least a few good shootouts and some bloody fun.
Only taken together, the name does have a somewhat frictionless quality — “timeless,”If you are generous, “generic” if you don’t. Which makes it so perfectly apt for Walter Hill’s perfectly perfunctory new film.
The fact that the director is behind “48 Hrs.” “The Warriors” will be honored with a career achievement prize at this year’s Venice Film Festival no doubt pushed his latest, low-budget Western towards such a tony debut, while the cast of Willem Dafoe and Christoph Waltz must have clearly sealed the deal. But, “Dead for a Dollar”It is not considered prestige fare and wears it proudly.
Hill dedicates his newest film to Budd Boetticher (the Michelangelo of two-bit oaters), and it is easy to see why. Thrown together with whatever spare parts were lying around, reverse-engineered around gaps in the name-actors’ schedules and displaying a visual style that seemingly sparedAllexpense, “Dead for a Dollar”He is proud to be a proud heir of a longstanding tradition of low-budget westerns. That’s both a feature, and a bug.
Waltz, Dafoe “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” star Rachel Brosnahan all get top billing; the fact that all share about the same amount of screen time as actor Luis Chávez might tell you something. Now don’t get me wrong, Chávez is a fine working actor with more than 20 years in the industry and 40 credits to his name; he’s also (tellingly)Nota name on the poster, though he was certainly on set as much as anyone else.
That this is a film of compromise and convenience — accepting the probably three days that Benjamin Bratt had to spare and swapping in an inexpensive proxy for other scenes — is not a rap against the project;AllFilms are made from compromise and convenience. Only then do the seams really show. As to the plot, well, best focus on the broad strokes as it sends three rival parties careening towards a climactic — and thrillingly orchestrated — shoot-out in a Podunk Mexican town.
We have Max Borlund, a bounty hunter (a stoic Waltz), and Sergeant Poe (Warren Burke), his army-supplied second guns. Both were sent south of the border in order to recover Rachel Price (Brosnahan), a all-American bride taken hostage by Elijah Jones, a Buffalo Soldier (Brandon Scott). There’s the bad: the Mexican warlord Tiberio Vargas (Bratt) and the dangerous men who his bidding, including but not limited to Mr. Chávez himself. And of course, we have Ugly, here in the guise of a card-shark wild card named Joe Cribbens, played hammy-with-a-side-of-beans by Dafoe.
Notice that the so-called kidnapper does not figure among the Bad, and you’ll catch one of the few modernized elements of the script written by Hill and Matt Harris. If the film remains too indelibly a throwback to be called anything like revisionist, Hill does try to weave in a more diversified set of perspectives, opening up the stage to Poe and Jones (Black soldiers serving a country that doesn’t see them as full citizens) and to Rachel, an independent woman in a culture that doesn’t know what to do with that.
Film doesn’t have any of these inclusions, “Dead for a Dollar”These conflicts are not dramatized or attempted to be engaged with. Instead, they are merely floating signifiers or stand-ins for an idea, rather than being the actual idea.
The only one who manages to escape this is the one that speaks least. Playing the kind of unhurried and self-contained no-bulls–t-artist that was Bruce Willis’ stock and trade before his retirement, Waltz trades in his urbane screen presence for a more stoic gunslinger archetype that doesn’t quite fit him as well. Which might very much be the point, as in an early scene where he shuts down a line of questions as to his character’s vaguely European accent (Swedish? Dutch? German?) The perfect retort. “I’m American,”He said.
A stunning shot is shown onscreen to give the perfect answer: Waltz and Burke riding horseback, the camera half a mile from the actors. It shows the two men galloping across an endless expanse of sky. The film has many such stunning shots. Thing is, you can probably count them all on two hands — with a few fingers to spare. Hill clearly had a similar motivation for Hill’s classically blocked final. He was drawn to the project because it offered the opportunity to evoke the mythic iconography found in the old-school Western. But, the mission was accomplished in a mere 10 minutes.
Everything in between can’t help but feel like filler, made all the more noticeable by a flatly lit, shallow-focus visual scheme for all the scene-setting exposition. You can quite literally feel the director’s own impatience emanating off the screen, made all the more acute by clipped performance styles and rushed editing patterns that cut each and every scene a beat earlier than feels natural. As if the film’s director, like the film’s target audience, are speaking in unison: Get to the action, show me a vista, give me the goods. Hill and his film deliver on that promise, but there is so much in-between to deflate any moments of joy.
“Dead for a Dollar”This is a wager, with 90% screen time and 10% poetry. That bet could pay off, especially after the film leaves Venice and closes its theatrical window. The film will then find its natural home as a cowboy on the green, endless range of Dad-Movie DTV.
“Dead for a Dollar”Quiver Distribution will release the movie in U.S. theaters, and on-demand September 30, via Quiver Distribution.