Facing off across the bars of a jail cell;
“I’LL BE A son-of-a-bitch, you killed me,” says the least lucky man in the climactic showdown that has been building since Dead For A Dollar’s opening scene. Yes, Walter Hill is back after six years with this Western throwback starring Christoph Waltz, Willem Dafoe and Rachel Brosnahan, and he’s doing what he does best: orchestrating hard-boiled, dust-strewn mayhem.
Even when working in other genres, Hill has always had one spur-adorned foot in the Western, using pithy existential dialogue in starkly framed scenarios as old scores are settled in a stripped-down moral universe. Consider the tense simplicity of the Coney Island face-off in The Warriors, or the way Bruce Willis’ wanderer Smith and Patrick Kilpatrick’s Irish mobster Finn circle each other in Last Man Standing. It’s exciting, then, to see him return finally to the genre proper.
Two gunslingers out for justice in the Old West;