Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Dollar for the Dead!

Theme: Wild West - Lissie

Exhibit Z in the increasingly slam-dunk case that just doing the clichés properly is always better than trying to be clever, 1999's forgotten Dollar for the Dead just takes the spaghetti western formula and delivers like Santa on meth. Emilio Estevez (The Breakfast Club) plays "Cowboy", which is scarcely any better than "Stranger" from Any Gun Can Play, but what are you gonna do?

Sometimes I try sitting like this all mysterious not talking to anyone. No one's picked a fight with me yet, I'm sure because they're too afraid.

Cowboy teams up with Dooley (William Forsythe), a Confederate veteran with one piece of a puzzle that will lead them to a stash of gold. Dooley is affable, Cowboy terse. Along the way they fight redlegs led by Mike from Breaking Bad, a hulking menace with a mysteeerious beef with Cowboy, and a Mexican general or colonel or something, IDK. The action is of the coolmaxxed variety: Cowboy does things like drop a shot glass, gun down his enemy, and catch it before it hits the floor - the sort of thing they try to have characters do in Disney Starwars but actually cool instead of ear gages and vape shops """"""""""""""""cool"""""""""""""""".

The entire genre of parody is cope for noone being this cool IRL.

Another gag you may recognise has him spin round in a circle shooting bullets through the floor until a whole circle of floor falls out from under him, delivering him handily from the antagonists rushing after him. Kate Beckinsale later copied this move in her mallcore goth flick Underworld.

"Weee" - Cowboy.

I don't actually know if it originated here or whether Dollar also ripped it off from somewhere, but if I were to come up with something that expressed the intersection of cartoon logic and cool, it would most likely be something like that (maybe dumber). It would be kind of funny if it turned out he shot dozens of random civilians through the floorboards, but you know he didn't because the world warps to accommodate you when you're a cool gunslinger instead of a real-life fuckup.

Note that Dollar shares the old Castellari motif of sticking the camera between, atop or underneath things ADHDly, for extra authenticity.

There's a lot of fun dialogue in the movie, too, which is nice because noone writes good dialogue anymore. I tried to think of a good line from a movie made this decade, and I couldn't, even though I tried as hard as I could possibly be bothered to. This wasn't very hard, and that's my point: they're just not good enough to try.  Watch Dollar for the Dead, practice quick-drawing finger-guns in front of your mirror, wear a cowboy hat, have autism, and, as ever, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.