Review of The Old Way and Dead for a Dollar
Two Western movies head to UK home release this month so we take the reins to see if these low-budget genre flicks can gun-sling their way to success...
Dead for a Dollar (2023) Dir. Walter Hill
Written and directed by Walter “Made one of my favourite films of all time, The Warriors” Hill, this American Western stars Christoph Waltz returning to his Oscar-winning genre as bounty hunter Max Borlund. Willem Dafoe plays Joe Cribbens, a criminal who was once caught by Borlund but is released from prison vowing revenge.
Meanwhile, Borlund is hired to find a missing wife (Rachel Brosnahan) and soon he’s crossing paths with army deserters and rich landowners. The trite yet still overly-complex and dull story of ransoms, fugitive-chasing and the odd double-cross are mostly a laborious chore and the film looks like an episode of Quantum Leap where Sam jumps into a bit-part actor on the set of Bonanza. A great cast is thoroughly wasted and the visuals are as flat as the New Mexico desert.
A reference to a card shark called ‘English Bill’ is less of an homage than it does remind everyone that Unforgiven exists (where Richard Harris stars as a character called ‘English Bob’) and frankly more time should be spent (re-)watching that stone cold classic. It clearly has a low budget but I would have thought that a director as experienced as Hill would have the necessary chops to cover some of the financial limitations. Heck, he cut his spurs on the genre having directed The Long Riders, Geronimo and Wild Bill. Sadly, it gets the better of him here whereas something like the fabulous-looking Bone Tomahawk is hugely cinematic despite costing just $1.8million.
As it is then, Dead for a Dollar is dead on arrival – a real Django “constrained” that can’t break away from a clichéd script, weak craftmanship and cheap soap-opera visuals.
★½
1.5/5
Dead for a Dollar is released on BluRay and DVD 27th February 2023
The Old Way (2023) Dir. Brett Donowho
20 minutes shorter and far more fun than the movie above is another Western, this time starring Nicolas Cage as a retired gunman. He plays Colton Briggs (great name), a once-violent man who has now settled down with his respectful wife and child having given up his previous brutal criminal life.
But his past catches up with him when a gang attacks his wife, killing her and leaving a blood-stained message for Briggs to find. Despite warnings from a US Marshall to leave things alone, Briggs burns his house down along with his former idyllic life and together with his daughter they go hunting for revenge.
Cage, whose films often vary wildly from critic pleasing dramas to unwatchable bilge, is highly engaging here but the material is, er, sub-par at best. But as he always does, Cage gives terrible plots and heard-it-all-before scripts a bit of life, even if it’s rarely subtle or nuanced. An ‘emotional’ campfire monologue is close to hilarious to be fair.
Ryan Kiera Armstrong is good however as the young Brooke, giving enough sass to help the standard father figure-young daughter dynamic we’ve seen elsewhere in films like True Grit. And some brutal moments mix well with some fairly solid cinematography – it looks like a film unlike Dead for a Dollar – and the whole thing is over in 95 fairly-swift but somewhat satisfying minutes.
The kind of no-nonsense straightforward genre film Friday nights were made for, The Old Way is unremarkable but certainly not in an unlikeable way – in fact its simplicity, and short runtime, make it an easy dumb watch. So saddle up for a humdrum horse ride into the bland-lands that wont disappoint fans of Cage’s continuing corny career choices.
★★
2/5
The Old Way is released on DVD 13th February 2023
Michael Sales
