Ripping through lonesome plains and highway desolation, two Texan brothers set out to rob banks that, technically, have been robbing their family for years. Tanner and Toby (Ben Foster and Chris Pine) are siblings at different ends of the spectrum: the first a wild coyote, a jittery flask of criminal energy; the second a melancholic fox, handsome, sad and serious.
Hell Or High Water opens with the two men clumsily robbing a bank in a near-deserted town in a remote part of Texas, a place so hammered by neglect and poverty that you wonder how much the bank would have in their drawers -- not much, in fact, and the amateur robbers only want small bills. They don't take much, they're not doing this to get rich but to free their family from the debts owed, in classic capitalist fashion, to the bank from which they're now stealing. Poverty, said Toby, is like a family disease. His grandfather had it, so had his father and now himself, and he's determined not to pass it on to his son. Hell Or High Water is at the simplest level a crime thriller in which two charismatic thieves are pursued by law enforcement officials (oddball Texas rangers, played by Jeff Bridges and Gil Birmingham). But David Mackenzie's film is ingrained in the issue of economic inequality and rural despair, with the mood firmly anchored in the underbelly of an America still reeling from the post-subprime blues. The western part of Texas is the oil-rich land that yields so much to banks and corporates and so little to the inhabitants -- either white, native or Mexican.
It also has strong characters. After hitting two banks, the Tanner-Toby brothers sit down to review their scheme, which includes laundering the stolen money in a casino in the former Indian Territory and paying off the mortgage of their mother's ranch. Rash and risk-taking, Tanner, as played by Foster, bowls through every challenge and glitch with boyish glee. The younger, more sobering Toby is cooler, smarter, though not without a rupture of violence, and he's played by Chris Pine in a role that expands his range as an actor after his blockbuster success as Captain Kirk in the new Star Trek franchise (and soon in Wonder Woman).
After all, much of Hell Or High Water concerns two pairs of men operating between cynicism and melancholy: the two brothers in the foreground, and the two Texas rangers trying to outwit them. Jeff Bridges plays Marcus Hamilton, an officer who's retiring in a few weeks, and his constant jibe at his partner Alberto, who's half Native American and half Mexican, is peppered with casual racism that, besides being some of the best jokes in the film, is weighed in uneasy historical vestige.
"My ancestors used to own all this land," said Alberto. This isn't a political statement; it's a cruel, honest joke that ends with him quipping that after the white men took all the land from the natives, the bank took it from the white men in turn.
Hell Or High Water can feel like a less existential version of No Country For Old Men -- a heist thriller populated by desperadoes and wrapped in the smothering plains of the American Southwest, windswept, prone to fire and violence. For all the genre formula -- the robbing, the hideout, the chase, the ambush -- this film is less about thrills than about slow-burn tension, and it stands out with its cultural and socio-economical specificity -- the Texan boys robbing Texan banks, then on the run from Texan lawmen and, at one point, a bunch of Texan gunslingers. The script is by Taylor Sheridan, who wrote last year's Tex-Mex drug thriller Sicario, and here, again, you're immersed in the way he shapes the spirit of frontier men who live by frontier law.
In a week with so many new openings, this low-key film may escape your radar. It shouldn't.
