It is easy to over praise “Hell or High Water,” a well-made and acted different sort of bank robbery film, but one in which victims die and are glossed over by the main sympathy for two brothers with reason to be on their crime spree. This is sort of a Clyde and Clyde film, but very low key in the telling in contrast to the ground-breaking “Bonnie and Clyde” film of the 1960s.
Brothers Toby Howard (Chris Pine) and Tanner Howard (Ben Foster), who have come from a life of poverty, a run-down cattle ranch, family problems and debts, and with Tanner having a substantial criminal and prison record, set out to steal enough money from banks to pay back bank money owed. It is a socially likable idea, with the intent of robbing banks to get the money owed a bank, not a spree just for greed or kicks, although they obviously also get pleasure out of their escapades.
Their mode of operation is to hit banks in sleepy, rural Texas towns, where in the morning they can burst in with faces covered, guns at the ready, and command tellers to empty their cash drawers. All goes along swimmingly at first, with easy getaways. Director David MacKenzie, working from a screenplay by Taylor Sheridan, relies mostly on understatement, and the film achieves small town and broader scenic scans to match the tone with excellent cinematography by Giles Nuttgens.
We wait for the glitch that we know will happen, and when something does go awry, there is a blazing gunfight as Toby and Tanner flee, at one juncture parting to go their own ways in separate vehicles. The film gets increasingly tense as we await the outcome for each man.
“Hell or High Water” gains immeasurably from the performance by Jeff Bridges as Marcus Hamilton, an easygoing but perceptive and dogged Texas Ranger about to retire. He has his own plan for getting the robbers as he heads for a town with his deputy, Alberto Parker (ably played by Gil Birmingham), a mix of Mexican and Comanche heritage.
One of the best scenes is a late-film confrontation between Toby and Marcus, not a gun battle, but a civilized if needling discourse, although Toby has a rifle just in case. That gives “Hell or High Water” an unusual twist.
What jostles the pleasure one gets from watching a superior crime film is the death toll on people who get shot with little fuss over most victims, as in many typical westerns. I recall the furor when in “Bonnie and Clyde” (“Hell or High Water” is nowhere in the same league) a lawman is shot in the face as the couple go on their rampage. This approach is the opposite, with death coming more casually in a movie that doesn’t attempt to make the same kind of rebellious statement that director Arthur Penn was making. In one sense, the casual treatment of the deaths in this opus is more disturbing.
That’s about as much as I want to say about “Hell or High Water”—I’ve probably divulged too much already—without spoiling it for the viewer. The film stands out in general glut of inferior films that surface, but that doesn’t mean it should be hyped for more than the well-tooled and thought-provoking little film that it is. A Lionsgate release. Reviewed August 20, 2016.