In his latest Western Dead For A Dollar, director Walter Hill mostly shoots blanks
The movie’s visuals are captured in John Ford-approved widescreen, which means plenty of boilerplate, if beautiful, shots of the endless plains. Otherwise, its look is Boetticher-simple yet too digitally smooth and lacking in grit. Many of the interiors look like mint-condition
stage sets. The blocking for the final shootout sees Borlund mostly standing in wide-open areas yet never getting shot. This-style climax provides a contact high of double-barreled violence, even if we don’t care a whit about what happens to anyone.Indeed, rarely has so little tension been generated by a hero with so many bad guys lining up to kill him. Willem Dafoe has a grand old time as Joe Cribbens, a Texas horse thief locked up by Borlund five years earlier.
whose advance man, Esteban, is played by a perfectly cast Luis Chávez. Hill liberally moves these chess pieces around as alliances shift and lies are uncovered, allowing everyone the chance to reveal or reclaim their moral good standing, including the Mexican authorities, who rarely come off well in Westerns.