Some big names face off in the trailer for Walter Hill’s Dead For A Dollar
Christoph Waltz, Willem Defoe, Rachel Brosnahan, and more star in Hill's latest film
Aux News Walter Hill
Westerns have been a recurring feature of Walter Hill’s long, and generally pretty bloody, filmmaking career basically since the beginning. Starting with 1980s’ The Long Riders, and snaking through films like Wild Bill and Geronimo (and even a brief stint directing a single episode of HBO’s Deadwood), Hill has returned to the oater form periodically across his long tenure in the movies. Now the Warriors and 48 Hours helmer has rolled out the trailer for his latest sepia-tinged bloodbath: Dead For A Dollar, starring Christoph Waltz, Willem Defoe, Rachel Brosnahan, Benjamin Bratt, and Brandon Scott.
Fans of Waltz’s past turns in the films of Quentin Tarantino might find something familiar in the trailer, which sees the Oscar winner once again taking on the role of an old-timey bounty hunter, this time saddled with a long-running rivalry with a professional gambler and killer played by Defoe. The two men’s conflict threatens to surge into the forefront after Waltz is hired to retrieve wayward wife Brosnahan at the behest of her husband, Hamish Linklater. But when he finally tracks her down, it becomes clear that the bounty hunter has wandered into a much more complicated situation than he previously thought.
From the trailer, Dead For A Dollar looks of a piece with recent Hill films, including the 2012 Stallone feature Bullet To The Head and 2016's truly strange The Assignment—which is to say that it’s pretty clearly a lower-budget genre exercise with some higher-budget names drawn in by Hill’s extensive pedigree and reputation. It’ll be interesting to see what Waltz, Defoe, and the rest of the film’s cast can develop from what seem to be some fairly stock characters here; pretty much everyone on this marquee could sleepwalk through the basic beats of a Western at this point, so we’re maintaining at least a tentative degree of hope.
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Hard Times, The Warriors, The Long Riders, Southern Comfort, Streets of Fire, Crossroads, Johnny Handsome, Trespass – so many great flicks!
Dead For A Dollar | Official Trailer 0:11 the first image with the Venice Festival logo still superimposed over it that’s underwater in the Florida Keys the Bahamas shallow water Atocha gold on white Bahama coral sand the sunlight through the water on the rough cut boards on the wall on the right is the fabric on a expensive cream coloured linen skirt with reflective thread horizontal stripes that show luminous light blue in bright Tokyo artificial light like Alexandrite in ultraviolet light it’s supposed to mess with the mammalian hindbrain threat matrix predator bands on a snake in shimmering water like a death’s head in a ice cube in a whisky advert a tequila advert on the back cover of a magazine face down on a expensive teak art moderne coffee table tall girl elegant not just thin lanky she’d have to be to wear a skirt with horizontal bands in it even wide spaced ones the actress who played the girl with the long blonde hair who lived in the house in the Florida Keys in the movie Night Moves can you hear her voice just a trace of testosterone cigarettes tequila bad choices sadness regret Jessica Biel Kate Beckinsale Charlize Theron he touched my hand the son of a bitch touched my hand Saoirse Ronan violet irises bitter angry Robin Wright in Blade Runner 2049 predator fucking Shakespeare line violent delights Margot Robbie stupid fucking fatalists in love with pessimism running to our doom fuck that Margot Robbie shouldn’t be there that stupid fucking line they gave her in Once Upon a Time in Los Angeles I’m in the movie they fucking cursed her she’ll carry it with her wherever she goes
Well, I’m gonna see this. Hill has made more good movies than not. And some are great. Just rewatched The Long Riders recently and it holds up well. Same with Southern Comfort which I saw (again) just last week. And I could be in the minority but I think Extreme Prejudice was a damn masterpiece. I think it was Roger Ebert who said that that movie had about three plots more than it needed, but… I considered that a good thing.I’d forgotten he did Crossroads! That was a lot of fun. [That’s the blues one with Ralph Macchio and Joe Seneca, not the Britny Spears movie, which for some reason I’ve never seen. Oh wait, the reason is that it was supposed to be awful.]
Don’t forget Steve Vai!
I grew up watching Crossroads (one of my mom’s favorites, and one of the earliest video tapes we had, along with Highlander and Shoot to Kill) and branched out on Hill’s films from there!
I know it doesn’t get a lot of love but I really like Last Man Standing. It also has a great Ry Cooder Soundtrack.
I saw it in theaters back when; I think it only “suffers” from being a remake. I’m glad that Hill had Cooder for so many of his soundtracks!
I find it jarringly odd in a good way that all the footage in the trailer is 4K crisp sharp, something I would not associate with Westerns.
That Willem Defoe-fella looks remarkably like the actor Willem Dafoe.
Oh this looks awful.
Hill is an icon of American cinema in my view. The bad stuff is bad, but when he’s not floundering and he has a clear vision, he’s a genius.
Unusual to see Waltz in a role where he looks scared and uncertain. Not his usual screen persona.
That’s a very rough looking trailer, budget wise. I would’ve mistaken it for a TV movie if it didn’t have so many big names in the cast.
The trailer isn’t the best but this looks old school as hell. Some of the shots look like they’re straight out of a 60’s western. I’m down for this.