Venice 2022: Dead for a Dollar Review

Gun-slinging antics of old can always be revived by those with passion for genre or director. Christoph Waltz and Willem Dafoe make their love for the legendary Walter Hill known by working with him on his most recent piece. Dead for a Dollar does not feel like a recent piece, though. Where its qualities lie in the old forms and traditions of genre piece semantics, Dead for a Dollar is as dusty and flustered as the rigid towns it hopes to piece together here. Old foes and new rivalries, the blur of morality and evil, all the usual pairings hoping to stake their claim in a piece that burns straight through its straight-to-streaming package quality.

As difficult as it may be to imagine Waltz and Dafoe in a feature that lacks both quality and technique, here it is. Laid bare, it is as ugly as it is a crying shame for Hill, whose latest feature is nowhere close to the glory days of his work. To expect so would be marginally unfair, but to expect something so poor is quite the surprise. Neither leading man comes out looking particularly great in this one, with scenery-chewing lines in a western that may feel inspired by the spaghetti classics of old, but come closer to the harsh reality of 1990s shlock. Because that is the feel presented here, and it is the overbearing theme that kills off what few unique and limited qualities Dead for a Dollar possesses.

Once a promising genre, the western is now a place of complete disregard for directors looking to bow out with big names or make a wildcard statement that riffs and rips from other directors. This is Hill’s Tombstone Rashomon. From its production designs and colour schemes, those eternally damned dark browns and dusty sand settings giving little emotional or physical variety to the script, which sees some of the all-time greats choking down some peculiarly poor dialogue is such a shame. There was never the chance for this to be truly incredible, but at the very least Dead for a Dollar could and should explore the fun of the western and what it can provide to audiences. Instead, it hopes that references and allusions to other, better films will keep it alive. Rachel Brosnahan and Hamish Linklater are along for this horror ride too.

Despite the star power so closely aligned, there is little love to be had for Dead for a Dollar. As predictable as it is flatlining in all the worst ways. Pairing Waltz and Dafoe should be a sure-fire hit, but it turns out their chemistry on-screen is unable to keep itself moving against the tide of bad writing. Every western will live or die on its action though, and Hill has managed to save the worst of that for the bitter shootout of poorly explored rivals and loved ones for the very end. A culmination of bad plot points caters to a clumsy shootout, where what brief action there is to be found is rushed and fumbled as time is called on yet another twist of the western genre, finally ebbing out the last of its dead horse allure.