Criticism of ‘The bounty hunter’, Walter Hill returns to the pure western

Making necessity a virtue, and the low budget (with B, by Boetticher), a clause of style and a moral-expressive framework, Walter Hill returns to his hometown, the western, with a proposal anchored not so much in generic essentiality, which also, but above all in the nudity and frontal enunciation of someone who doesn’t have time to waste in pleasant circumlocutions and protocols adjusted to a time that is no longer theirs (not that of the pseudo-legendary West, but the ‘now’). In a long itinerary through empty spaces on the edge of scenic abstraction, which on the one hand reminds us of Mount Hellman from the almost Beckettian ‘The Shooting’ (1966) and, on the other, the group dynamics of westerns with literary breath from Richard Brooks or Robert Aldrich, and, of course, to Leone’s choreographed opera, ‘The bounty hunter’ exalts the austere iconography of Series B of a gun, hat and horse (this time the arid Chihuahuan desert, and not the rocky Mojave), reaching truly shocking limits of representative purification today.

the last frontier

Accurate as always in a mise-en-scene so disarmingly honest that it often consists merely of consistently alternating wide shots and close-ups, Hill manages the geometries of the environments in relation to each narrative thread, ultimately weaving a kind of theater of the absurd (violent, of course) that invokes feelings of loss, delusion, threat or nostalgia, depending on the psychological conjunctures and emotional arcs of some characters made with testosterone paste and estrogen juice, smiling anarchism, sun-baked existentialism and sharp-nailed rage. And once again in the work of the director of both the distant and mythical ‘The Warriors’ (1979) and the little praised but superb miniseries ‘The Protectors’ (2006), the dynamics of Greek tragedy are there to illuminate, with nuances, themes whose perception could, in the worst case, be too much contemporary, by circumstance. See here, a look at the feminine and racial struggles that even connects with the original nature of the western as a genre, not to say a product, American par excellence, and as a narrative artifact capable of critically reflecting on the very founding values ​​of the nation.

For westernophiles of those spearheaded in the shipyard

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DATA SHEET

Address: Walter Hill Distribution: Christoph Waltz, Willem Dafoe, Rachel Brosnahan, Hamish Linklater Country: USA Year: 2022 Release date: 12–5-2023 Gender: Western Script: Matt Harris, Walter Hill Duration: 114 min.

Synopsis: The deserter soldier Elijah Jones seems to have kidnapped and held in Mexico Rachel Price, an elegant woman from a good family. Her husband hires legendary bounty hunter Max Borland to bring her back to Texas.