Dead for a Dollar

With the help of a solider a bounty hunter takes a job to search for a businessman' wife who has been kidnapped by a deserter.

Walter Hill returns to directing delivering a bitter sweet Western. Hill offers tension, twists, whippings and shootouts with a great cast including Christoph Waltz, Willem Dafoe, Brandon Scott, Warren Burke and Benjamin Bratt to name a few. Waltz and Defoe are on form; but Scott is a screen stealer. Writers Matt Harris and Hill's story has all the Western high jinx you'd want from a genre piece. However, considering Hills past work, the camera work is lacklustre, shaky, the sound design, the scene transitions and colour timing is off, giving it a rough low budget TV feel. This sucks the life out of the great locations sets and costumes that not even the fitting traditional score can lift.

Overall, if your expecting the grandeur of great Western's you may be left disappointed, however, it offers top performances and a good old fashion western yarn.

I'd start by saying Waltz, Dafoe, Bratt and the others are great actors. All did a great job with what they had here. Problem is, not sure what they had here.

The scenes were a bit choppy and kept waiting for a tv commercial to play between them.

Pretty sure I nodded off at one point and missed some, but it made no difference.

This was a western, I think, but not one I'd recommend for western movie watchers. The actors are top notch but just couldn't save it.

I would have tried for a spaghetti western vibe over this 50s American tv series type. The scenes with Waltz and Dafoe were good but the writing, no sir, I didn't like it.

It was simply too elementary. Ah well, better luck next time.

I read the poor reviews, and I think I saw a different movie. Either that, or those who don't like Westerns because . . . They're Westerns, decided to vent their frustrations after junk like Batgirl, The 4400 remake, the Bros flick, and the other Hollywood trendy junk people don't want fell flat. Who knows?

This is Walter Hill being Walter Hill. Gritty, realistic, devoid of Technicolor fluff. The landscape is unpleasant, uninviting, because that's what it is in this area of the southwest. People are living on the hard edge, because there isn't much else.

This tale, in the mold of The Professionals and The Wild Bunch, is not in the same category as The Undefeated. There's no sweetness and light, just the reality people of this era faced.

The acting is fine, the script is good, and the directing, that's Walter Hill. My only knock on this one, the same lighting and filtering used in the exteriors was applied to the interior shots in a way that's noticeable. That's not something one should notice.

Sure, the film falls short in many aspects. Could have made better use of Willem Dafoe character, especially the demise scene. He had some great acting moments in this movie though, as if born for the Western. Always been a fan of Walter Hill, and this just being a Walter Hill film, raises it in my eyes. I enjoyed the script foe the most part, the acting, and the general pacing of the movie. It does feel a bit studio produced, with very crisp digitally feeling shots, not quite as dusty and dirty as maybe it should be. There is also a very minimalistic soundtrack, which makes the whole thing feel a bit like a TV movie. Still, it' s a enjoyable movie, reminiscent of the Spaghetti Westerns of old.

Sometimes you just want to sit down and be entertained and not really think that much. Dead for a Dollar is no The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, it never strives to be a film on that scale. Dead for a Dollar is for entertainment, a western with a simplistic plot and plenty of action, a film which takes its sweet time.

A famed bounty hunter runs into his sworn enemy, a professional gambler and outlaw that he had sent to prison years before.

Dead for a Dollar is written and directed by Walter Hill, who made The Warriors which is his most famous. It stars Christoph Waltz, Willem Dafoe, and Rachel Brosnahan, which are quite big names and their performances were great. Brandon Scott, Warren Burke, Benjamin Bratt, and Hamish Linklater also star. The cinematography was amazing, with lots of stunning shots. The mise-en-scene too was great. You can say what you want for the writing, it isn't the film's strong point, but the direction is solid and the cooperation between Walter Hill and Lloyd Ahern II is terrific. About the pacing, I thought it was good in the first half but it just kept dragging on during its second half. For a low budget film, this is an excellent film, because of how he used the money for the production. Brutal action which he doesn't shine away from, how beautiful the film actually looks, Walter Hill created a good film. I liked it a lot and when the climax happens, when you arrive to the ending, the slow pacing in the second half becomes worth the wait. Nicely executed by Walter Hill.