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In his latest Western Dead For A Dollar, director Walter Hill mostly shoots blanks - The A.V. Club

In his latest Western Dead For A Dollar, director Walter Hill mostly shoots blanks - The A.V. Club

In his latest Western Dead For A Dollar, director Walter Hill mostly shoots blanks - The A.V. Club
Sep 30, 2022 1 min, 8 secs

But it’s his Westerns—the plodding Dead For A Dollar notwithstanding—that have earned him a place in the directing firmament.

In Dead For A Dollar, Hill neither revisits the visual extremes he flirted with in 1995’s Wild Bill nor does he honor his mentor, director Sam Peckinpah, with balletic brutality rendered in slow-motion.

They do it.’’ And that brings us to Dead For A Dollar, about a bounty hunter named Max Borlund who has a job to do, and he does it.

Speaking of which, if all this sounds like it could be a riff on The Searchers, Hill, who co-wrote the Dead For A Dollar script with Matt Harris, doesn’t take the bait.

The blocking for the final shootout sees Borlund mostly standing in wide-open areas yet never getting shot.

Willem Dafoe has a grand old time as Joe Cribbens, a Texas horse thief locked up by Borlund five years earlier.

Ultimately, Hill performs his duties like a man for hire in Dead For A Dollar, much like Max Borland is a man for hire down in Mexico.

As Hill, the Emmy-winning producer of the 2006 Western miniseries Broken Trail once recounted, “The old-time actors used to say if you have the right horse and the right hat the rest was downhill.” With Hill’s Dead for a Dollar, that turns out to be untrue.

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