Tarantino darling Christoph Waltz is playing bounty hunter again, but this hard-hitting western isn’t (thankfully) Django Unchained 2

King Schultz from Django Unchained talked a lot when the day was long and sunk at least as many balls into his opponents. Quentin Tarantino’s role as the Teutonic Doctor earned Christoph Waltz his second Oscar. In Dead for a Dollar he again plays a bounty hunter who has to free a woman. Sounds like Django Unchained 2.0. But that’s definitely not Dead for a Dollar.

The Western, which is shown at the Venice Film Festival, is entertaining nonetheless Wortwitz, hail of bullets and a duel between Waltz and Willem Dafoe. Yes, that’s right, you read that right: Christoph Waltz and Willem “the green goblin” Dafoe in a western duel. Venice makes dreams come true!

Christoph Waltz’ latest bounty hunter has little in common with King Schultz

Waltz’ hero is very different from Schultz from Django Unchained. So apart from the job. This time he plays Max Borland, bounty hunter and loner. He’s the type of person who limits his speech to the essentials. Unlike the king, Waltz plays him as the only understatement, which is why you can’t really assess him for a long time. It’s a subtle contrast to his Tarantino roles. Where Schultz goes far, Borland gets to the point – if necessary with a bullet from his revolver. With Max Borland instead of King Schultz, Django Unchained would have lasted only 90 minutes.

Which is not meant as a criticism of Tarantino’s rambling dialogue. Director and co-writer Walter Hill (Last Man Standing) just doesn’t feel like it.

Check out the trailer for Dead for a Dollar:

Max Borland must rescue a businessman’s kidnapped wife. At his side rides the African-American soldier Poe (Warren Burke), who is friends with the kidnapper. However, when they both track down Rachel Kidd (Rachel Brosnahan) in Mexico, they face a problem. Rachel doesn’t want to go back to her husband (Hamish Linklater). Also involved are Willem Dafoe as robber Joe Cribbins and Benjamin Bratt as gang leader Tiberio Vargas. Sometimes bullets fly. The end.

Simplicity has method in Western Dead for a Dollar

Hill’s latest film moves in the Tradition of crisp B-Westerns from the 50s, with a little Italo twist. Directors like Budd Boetticher (to whom this film is dedicated) and André De Toth (The Stranger Wore a Gun) sent meager heroes on straightforwardly staged adventures whose stories were still too small for napkins.

These films were deliberately simple compared to expensive Western epics like The Black Hawk or socially critical plays like High Noon. Through their small budgets and limited spaces, they exposed basic human stories of loneliness, violence, and the survival of morality in an immoral world.

Dead for a Dollar takes that path with a sparsely told story about men and women hardened by the American West. Christoph Waltz’ Max Borland is one of them, as is Rachel Brosnahan’s wife, who wasn’t actually kidnapped.

Anyone who only knows Brosnahan from The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel on Amazon will become one in Dead for a Dollar unexpected steely side of her discover. And see how she shoots people. Her Rachel was disappointed by the dream of the west, but she still has to live in this world. Adapt and die in misery is the motto for the characters, which drives some to Mexico, others to a violent life as a homeless bounty hunter. There are no heroes, only people who still have a working conscience or those who have given it up for profit.

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Dead for a Dollar picks up similar themes as Django Unchained, but handles them in a very different way

In a way, Dead for a Dollar is to Django Unchained what the B-Westerns were to the John Ford and John Wayne films. Tarantino plays with the genre, takes it to the southern states and turns it into one Revenge fantasy against slave drivers Leonardo DiCaprio. This is equipped with baroque dialogues, extremely complex set pieces in which everyone involved plays a double game, and fountains of fake blood.

Walter Hill, on the other hand, takes the Western in Dead for a Dollar back to its basic building blocks (a man, a horse and a duel) and touches on big themes such as functional dialogues Racism, corruption and American expansionism. But he never makes it look like these are “big” issues. Django is a violent opera, Dead for a Dollar is an unsentimental ballad about living and dying in the dust of the new world.

Sometimes you can see Dead for a Dollar’s small budget and short shooting time. But that doesn’t bother you. When push comes to shove, so if Christoph Waltz with a Winchester against a pack of bandits goes ahead or a Mexican standoff ends in bloodbath, then Walter Hill delivers.

The duel between Christoph Waltz and Willem Dafoe? This hits the heart unexpectedly. And that doesn’t mean a ball. So not only.