Hell or High Water (2016)
★★★★ — Hell or High Water (2016)
Hell or High Water arrived in the summer of 2016 to the kind of quiet, word-of-mouth reception that studio marketing departments can't really manufacture. Set against the sun-scorched plains of West Texas, the film follows two brothers, a divorced father named Toby and his rougher-edged sibling Tanner, who hatch a series of bank robberies to hold onto the family land their late mother left behind. It is a premise that sounds, on the surface, like familiar genre territory, but the screenplay (written by Taylor Sheridan, who had also scripted Sicario the previous year) plants its feet firmly in the economic anxieties of contemporary rural America: payday loan shops, reverse mortgage signs, and boarded-up main streets that speak to a slow collapse happening well outside the news cycle. The film arrived at a particular cultural moment when questions about who the banking system serves, and who it leaves behind, were very much part of the public conversation, and Sheridan's writing gives the story a weight that lingers past its 102-minute runtime.
Behind the camera is Scottish director David Mackenzie, whose career had previously taken in a wide range of tones and genres. Hell or High Water proved to be his most commercially and critically visible work to date, produced under the combined banner of Sidney Kimmel Entertainment, Film 44, and OddLot Entertainment. Mackenzie keeps things lean and unhurried, trusting the landscape and the performances to do the heavy lifting rather than reaching for any kind of stylistic flourish. Giles Nuttgens's sun-bleached cinematography and a score with strong roots in American folk and country music give the film a sense of place that feels earned rather than arranged for effect. It is polished but never showy, the kind of filmmaking that only becomes visible once you start thinking about how it might have gone wrong in other hands.
The cast is where the film really earns its reputation. Chris Pine, often associated with glossier blockbuster fare, strips things back considerably here, and Ben Foster matches him with the kind of volatile, barely-contained energy that makes their sibling dynamic feel genuinely lived-in. Then there is Jeff Bridges, playing Texas Ranger Marcus Hamilton with a laconic, sun-weathered authority that is very much in the tradition of great Western lawmen, recalling something of the moral weight he brought to his role in True Grit. Bridges has, across a long career, shown a particular gift for characters shaped by place and time, and fans of his earlier work will find echoes of that quality going back at least as far as The Last Picture Show. Gil Birmingham and Marin Ireland round out a supporting cast that, without exception, treats even small roles as worthy of full attention. As a piece of contemporary crime drama, the film invites comparison with some of the leaner entries in the genre, though it sits closer to the brooding, landscape-driven end of the Western tradition than anything you might find in something like Little Caesar, or, for that matter, the more classical frontier territory of Rio Bravo.
A modern Western. No thrills, no fuss, just a damn good film. A modern Western that doesn’t need to shout to be heard. Chris Pine and Ben Foster are fantastic as the desperate brothers, and Jeff Bridges is just effortlessly brilliant. The story's tight and rooted in reality, with just the right amount of grit. It’s about poverty, banks, justice, and family, all told with a slow-burn intensity. The cinematography captures that dusty Texan bleakness perfectly, and the soundtrack complements every frame without overdoing it. Understated but powerful. One of the best crime dramas of the last decade.
For me, what stays with you after Hell or High Water isn't any single scene or line of dialogue, but the accumulation of it all: the feeling that everyone on screen, on both sides of the law, is caught in a system that was never really designed with them in mind. It is rare to come away from a crime film feeling that the moral accounting has been done honestly, without the story needing to tidy things up or hand you a verdict. That restraint is exactly what gives it its staying power. Some films earn their reputation loudly. This one just quietly turns out to be right.
Rating: ★★★★ | Year: 2016 | Watched: 2025-04-15
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Hell or High Water (2016) on YouTube
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Related on Movies With Macca
More with Jeff Bridges: The Last Picture Show (1971) · Surf's Up (2007) · True Grit (2010) · Crazy Heart (2009)
More from the 2010s: Wonder (2017) · Beautiful Boy (2018) · The Witch (2015) · What We Do in the Shadows (2014)
More western: The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) · Rio Bravo (1959) · Ride Lonesome (1959) · The Great Train Robbery (1903)
More crime: A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Angst (1983) · Stolen Face (1952) · Cairo Station (1958)
