Welcome to west Texas, where law and justice aren’t always two sides of the same coin.
British filmmaker David Mackenzie’s (Starred Up) new forlorn, contemporary western Hell or High Water – starring Chris Pine and Ben Foster as bank-robbing brothers and Jeff Bridges and Gil Birmingham as the tough Texas Rangers on their tails – is a cut above your typical genre film.
In fact, it’s one of the best films of 2016 so far.
Written by former actor turned screenwriter Taylor Sheridan (Sicario), the film follows brothers Toby (Pine) and Tanner Howard (Foster), who try to right a wrong by robbing several branches of the bank, which is trying to opportunistically foreclose on their family farm.
Retiring Ranger Marcus Hamilton (Bridges) and his half-Comanche comrade Alberto Parker (Birmingham) are put on the case after the FBI considers the robberies below them and a waste of time. That doesn’t sit well with Marcus, who is looking for one last case so he can go out with a bang.
The film plays a lot like the Coen Brothers’ 2007 Oscar-winning masterpiece, No Country For Old Men and both Mackenzie and Sheridan channel the same Cormac McCarthy style and violence that marked out that film.
This west Texas is a hard land filled with hard, decent and lonely men looking for redemption and a second-chance. If that is through crime, then so be it.
Hell or High Water has moments that wouldn’t seem out of place in a thriller but, this is a drama more interested in the characters who populate it than in the cheap thrills that would be manufactured out of this script if it were in the hands of a less-capable filmmaker than Mackenzie, who shoots the film in a subtle, yet effective way, reveling in the silences that separate the punctuations of brutal, shocking violence.
The performances are solid across the board with Bridges in particular showing why he is still one of the best, underrated actors in the business.
It never fails to amaze how easy he makes acting look, even while running through several emotions in one scene like a typhoon.
Pine, as well, appears to be trying to shed his image as blockbuster leading Captain Kirk from the Star Trek franchise and shows he has some real acting chops playing a modern-day Robin Hood who robs the rich and gives to the poor.
The film doesn’t match No Country For Old Men in terms of being the pinnacle of the neo-western genre (what film does?), but make no mistake, there is genius here, all you need to do is take it in.
You won’t be disappointed.
For information on local screenings, visit www.cochranemoviehouse.com.
