Hell or High Water the best film of 2016 or thereabouts says Leigh Paatsch
FILM REVIEW: If the dynamic and transfixing Hell or High Water isn’t the best film of the year, then it won’t be missing that exalted mark by much.
Leigh Paatsch
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HELL OR HIGH WATER (MA15+)
Director: David Mackenzie (Starred Up)
Starring: Chris Pine, Ben Foster, Jeff Bridges, Gil Birmingham, Marin Ireland, Katy Mixon.
Rating: 4.5 / 5
They’ll take the money and run, but they’re not about to hide
IF this isn’t the best film of the year, then it won’t be missing that exalted mark by much.
On first appearances, Hell Or High Water appears to working with basic storytelling factors too tried and tested to carry our full attention for long.
The principal setting is the far west of Texas, a dust bowl of dashed hopes, dirty back roads and down-and-out diners.
The featured characters are two brothers starting a career in armed robbery, and a veteran cop just weeks away from retirement.
And yet, in just a matter of minutes, Hell Or High Water has cast a dynamic, transfixing spell that will not be broken, come what may.
All by merely clearing a corner of the world that is not just there to be looked at, but lived in. Once the film has lured you there, you will regret ever having to leave.
Desperate times might have forced brothers Toby (Chris Pine) and Tanner (Ben Foster) to take desperate measures. However, if though they are newcomers to the bank holdup business, they are not about to take elaborate risks.
The pair target only small rural branches. Jobs are timed early in the morning, when few innocent bystanders are about. They only empty tellers’ drawers of whatever bills they might be holding, and leave the big safes be. This makes tracing the money difficult, and keeps the federal authorities from taking much notice.
Therefore all that really stands in their way of completing a short series of stick-ups — in the interest of saving the family farm from foreclosure by the same banks they are robbing — is a grouchy old Texas Ranger.
Marcus (Jeff Bridges) freely admits he wouldn’t mind a little more action before his long career patrolling the plains are over. So he begins profiling and second-guessing the movements of Toby and Tanner from afar.
Each of Marcus’ hunches place him closer to a future scene of a crime, where he and his long-suffering partner, a Cherokee-Mexican patrolman named Alberto (Gil Birmingham) will be waiting to stop the rot before someone gets hurt.
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While Marcus and Alberto take the slow and scenic route to this day of reckoning, level-headed Toby and hot-headed Tanner are in a rush to get their mission over and done with.
Meanwhile, West Texas just goes on being West Texas — and the famously relaxed redneck spirit that defines the region (remember No Country For Old Men?) will have the last call on shaping the destinies of all four men (superbly acted across the board) involved in this gripping crime yarn.
Originally published as Hell or High Water the best film of 2016 or thereabouts says Leigh Paatsch
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