'Hell Or High Water' A Review

Hell Or High Water is a western crime drama about two brothers who rob banks in order to pay off the mortgage on their family ranch. The film opens on Toby(Chris Pine) and Tanner(Ben Foster) driving up to a Texas Midland Bank and holding it up before it opens. We then follow the brothers, as well as the Texas Rangers assigned to track them down, as they rob more banks and launder the money at a local casino in order to get enough money to avoid foreclosure.

Pine and Foster have great chemistry and give rich, playful, understated performances. Moments of poignancy are punctuated by humor and throughout they maintain a casual authenticity that compliments the bleak and beautiful landscape. Jeff Bridges as Marcus, the ranger tracking them down, gives an atypically quiet turn with flashes of complicated restrained emotion. The entire supporting cast evokes a sense of reality and that elevates the relatively straight forward but engaging story with exceptional turns by Katy Mixon and Margaret Bowman.

Narratively uncomplicated but texturally layered the film incorporates not only class struggle and the mortgage crisis but most successfully lays out the moral grayness of the situation. Crime with justification is still crime and has a cost. This is done tactfully and without judgment in a way that elevates, what on the surface at least, appears to be typical genre fair.

Beautifully shot and gracefully scored with diegetic and non-diegetic music both work together to create a singular world. The film delightfully subverts the summer heist movie expectation and delivers something altogether more artful.

Great performances, vivid production design, a surprisingly resonant plot.

See It.