Dead for a Dollar

There is nothing flashy about Walter Hill’s latest western Dead for a Dollar.

Rarely has so little tension been generated by a hero with so many bad guys lining up to kill him.

Hill turns... shortcomings into virtues. The picture’s surface austerity and simplicity have a crystallizing effect, drawing our attention to the coldhearted, transactional nature of this world.

While Hill may not have had the money to make his movie look as polished as his own “The Long Riders” or “Wild Bill,” he can still write crackling dialogue, and he can still stage a shootout as well as anyone ever has.

Hill had a job to do. He did it.

Sluggishly paced, stodgily scripted and curiously edited, it’s not so much a bullet ballet as a creaky dance across an abandoned saloon.

Dead for a Dollar threads the needle between traditional Westerns of Boetticher’s ilk and the more revisionist sensibilities that Hill brought to the genre in the run of them he made in the ‘90s.

Sans any significant subtexts to enhance the resilience of its various characters, there’s a sense of going through the motions despite some stand out moments from a sterling Dafoe.

Unfortunately, Dead for a Dollar is also one of those films you forget as soon as you’ve left the screening

... A film that, it seems, was created from beginning to end by a program that doesn't understand human emotions or behaviors. [Full review in Spanish]