Dead for a Dollar

Year: 2022

Actors: Hamish Linklater, Willem Dafoe, Rachel Brosnahan, Christoph Waltz

Duration: 107 min

The movie begins with an encounter between a prisoner and the bounty hunter that had captured him. The bounty hunter is the protagonist of the story. The prisoner becomes one of the antagonists after he is released from prison. After some interludes and flash backs the bounty hunter is recruited by the military to go into Mexico, find and bring back the wife of an influential businessman. She had been abducted by an Army deserter and was now being held for ransom. A soldier guide for the bounty hunter was appointed by the Army. As it turns out the guide is a fellow soldier and friend of the Army deserter. He had also claimed to know the possible whereabouts of the woman and her captors. After trekking into Mexico, they encounter another of the antagonists who happens to be a powerful land owner and a kind of warlord. After a stale mate standoff that resulted in a retreat by the villain, the two continued on to the place where the abducted woman was possibly being held. As it turns out the suspected place was exactly where the woman was being held by her captors. The captors were surprised and during the encounter one of the captors is killed. At that point it is learned the woman had actually run off with the deserter soldier who incidentally happens to be black. She and her abductor paramour were then placed under arrest by the bounty hunter and his guide. They all traveled to the nearest town where the deserter was put in jail and the woman into a hotel. A subplot was going on with the ex-prisoner's escapades having won a gunfight over a poker game. The man killed was associated with the powerful warlord antagonist who controlled the town where the abducted woman and deserter were being held. The warlord then recruits the ex-prisoner to kill the bounty hunter who had killed another one of his associates. One thing leads to another and the abducted woman's husband arrives. He promptly murders the woman's paramour in the jail then goes to confront his wife at the hotel where she is being held. At the encounter she pulls out a gun and kills him. The warlord then rides into town with a troupe of men intending to wreak havoc out of revenge for one of his associates being killed there. The bounty hunter and his guide have been preparing for the onslaught along with local law enforcement.The gang of marauders are systematically dispensed with all except for the warlord who promptly murders the town constable. He meets his end shortly thereafter. The whole melee winds up with only the bounty hunter and the ex-prisoner standing on the street facing one another. The bounty hunter wins the gun battle. He condescendingly then tells the woman her husband must have been killed by one of the marauders. She goes free. The bounty hunter's soldier guide who was wounded in the battle survives, goes back to the Army and the bounty hunter goes his separate way, continues to do his bounty work somewhere else.

Genre: Action   Adventure   Drama   Thriller   Western