Nerdly » ‘Blood For Dust’ Review

19th Apr2024

‘Blood For Dust’ Review

by Jasmine Valentine

Stars: Kit Harington, Scoot McNairy, Josh Lucas, Ethan Suplee, Nora Zehetner | Written by David Ebeltoft | Directed by Rod Blackhurst

Cliff (Scoot McNairy) is a struggling salesman, with employers closing doors on him like there’s no tomorrow. Through a chance encounter, he reconnects with old friend Ricky (Kit Harington), who now is a drugs runner across Montana. With Cliff in dire straits, the two agree to team up, prompting even more danger than they could ever have imagined.

Without even getting into its nuances — or at least, finer details — Blood For Dust can be best summed up as an inoffensive movie that we’ve definitely seen before. However, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Harking back to the black comedy vibe of Fargo, merely replacing the comedy element with the Midwestern gritty violence of Yellowstone, the movie well knows what it is. Most importantly, it knows where it is. Cliff is a man lost in a sea of endless mountains, guns, and men who run their mouths for no reason other than they enjoy the sound of their own voices. It’s a wasteland, but a familiar one.

Director Rod Blackhurst eases his film into the slow haze of core Americana, and it’s as seductive as you might expect. Dragging himself through the motions, Cliff is at a point of desperation when viewers meet him in Blood For Dust’s opening scenes. A wanton lack of anything outside of his own survival pulls him into a local strip club, flooded with different temptations that don’t ever register in his mind. Fairly quickly, Ricky becomes the only path to achieving something more, forcing Cliff’s hand to reveal a different kind of Americana altogether. This kind kills for pride, has a blatant disregard for convention, and really just couldn’t care less.

All of these facets evolve into blood-curling scenes that makes Blood For Dust compelling in the moment, but instantly forgettable after the moment has passed. It’s spectacularly put together for a — presumably — low-budget independent movie, with its visuals and commitment to craft clear and slick. However, it fades into the background of the drug-fuelled stories that came before it, and that’s largely due to a lack of personality. All parts are acted to necessity, with Kit Harington’s American accent in particular moving him away from Game of Thrones darling into a brooding real-life criminal. Yet, there’s never much that lurks underneath the surface.

Matching its exterior almost a little too well, Blood For Dust is a chameleon, blending into its own idea so hard that things become indistinguishable. It no longer matters who is shooting at who, who runs what, and who is going to survive in the end — they’ve all become versions of the same person, and that person somehow remains anonymous.