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Dirty wars, covert operations, "not Lebanon or Honduras. Fucking Texas!" The Ranger (Nick Nolte) raids cantinas with the Sheriff (Rip Torn), romances the roadhouse songbird (María Conchita Alonso), sees the childhood comrade become a drug lord (Powers Boothe). Meanwhile, the "zombie unit" of servicemen listed as dead is led by a mercenary major (Michael Ironside) into a bank heist, the kingpin's little black book is the treasure. The separate strands are braided at the end of a trail of betrayal for a collision of grungy Western and paranoid thriller. "Here we are, space-age, high-tech... and we get caught by some stone-age cowboy." The Wild Bunch, sure, but also The Killer Elite and Vera Cruz and The Border, balanced splatters on Walter Hill's grand canvas. The hero is a rock formation in the land of "crooked rivers and crooked men," his life is his duty but he knows that the dope-runner bleeding by the jukebox is just a farmer trying to make ends meet. His opposite number favors white suits and crushes scorpions in his hand, all while lamenting that his scuzzy henchmen don't appreciate his subtle articulation. "Hell, there ain't no right or wrong, there's only choices." The desert makes for a perfect arena for the Contragate Eighties, with Clancy Brown, William Forsythe and Dan Tullis Jr. vividly keyed to the portrait of reprogrammed warriors. The imagistic density of Hill's mayhem builds and builds until it bursts in a squib fiesta at the Mexican stronghold, complete with a ceremonial degradation of the ten-paces duel trope. "Well, it's a good day for a killin'." As pointed a political tract as Stone's Salvador, closing not with purification but with a change in management. With Matt Mulhern, Larry B. Scott, John Dennis Johnston, Luis Contreras, Carlos Cervantes, Tom Lister Jr., Marco Rodríguez, James Lashly, and Kent Lipham.
--- Fernando F. Croce |