‘Blood for Dust’ Review: Dire Straits
This drug-run thriller, starring Scoot McNairy, traffics in grim ponderousness.In “Blood for Dust,” Cliff (Scoot McNairy), a salesman, hawks defibrillators across the upper western states. The devices are a tough sell, he admits. Yet this sluggish, self-serious job-gone-wrong movie could itself stand to be jolted to life.It emerges that, while working for a previous employer, Cliff participated in an elaborate theft scheme that ended with the accounting man’s suicide. That gory mess, seen in a prologue set in 1992, provides the first image, in the sort of sudden brutality that is meant to shock but instead comes across as posturing.Flash forward 17 months, to when the bulk of the action takes place. Cliff has debts, a tarnished reputation and a wife (Nora Zehetner) with whom he has had the experience of caring for a cancer-stricken child. (Evidently opening with a suicide wasn’t grim enough.) Ricky (Kit Harington), a former colleague in the scandal, approaches Cliff with an offer. “I could use a man don’t mind breaking the rules,” he drawls in an accent far removed from the Montana setting.Cliff doesn’t trust that pitch — and the barely recognizable Harington shouldn’t have trusted in that horseshoe mustache — but desperation is desperation. So Cliff joins a drug-running operation, with predictably violent consequences.Directed by Rod Blackhurst, “Blood for Dust” is a throwback, in the sense of being exceedingly familiar. An early shot of a snow-covered parking lot inevitably evokes “Fargo,” but “Blood for Dust” doesn’t have a witty line or a glimmer of humor. The climactic shootout is so dimly lit that it’s difficult to discern who is firing at whom. It’s easy enough to guess.Blood for DustRated R. Gun violence and a topless bar. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More
