

Other times it'll leave you covering your mouth or biting your lip. At times it's languid, content to bask in its world, like in a number of scenes where characters shoot the shit over a beer or five or interact with eye witnesses, waitresses (one waitress in particular is a standout), and hotel clerks. It's an extremely enjoyable picture with quite a few laugh lines (a Mr. Make no mistake, Hell or High Water's subtext shouldn't get you down. (Sheridan's making his directorial debut next year and it should be on everyone's most-anticipated list.) Sheridan probably isn't a seer, but Hell or High Water even finds the space to reflect on concealed-carry permitting. In Sicario, that meant playing by cartel rules in Hell or High Water, it's feeding the snake its own tail. Sometimes the only solution is to game the system right back.

By means legal and illegal, everyday folks get fucked over by institutions bigger than them (a scene in which Bridges attempts to confiscate a waitress's $200 tip as evidence is especially heartrending) and there's no escaping it. Yeah, crime isn't great, but neither is the bank foreclosing on your house. Moreover, he possesses a thesis: how the West was lost. He's got an ear for dialogue and a knack for memorable characters-no matter how briefly they're on screen. In just his second film (last year's Sicario was his debut), the former actor (he played Deputy Hale on Sons of Anarchy) has perfected his authorial voice. The real star of the movie though, oddly, may be its writer Taylor Sheridan.
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If a cable network wants to do a prequel series about these two, I'd be into it. If the characters weren't named, you'd think they were Dead and Pan. Their relationship is established from their first scene together: These two have worked with each other for years and respect each other as cops and as men, even if that's shown through insults about alcoholism and Alzheimer's. The repartee between Hamilton and his half-Mexican, half-Comanche partner Alberto Parker (Gil Birmingham, the First Nations actor familiar to anyone with a Netflix account) is some of the film's best. If you squint, Jeff Bridges' Marcus Hamilton could be Jeff Lebowski if he never tried pot and went straight back in the '70s. There's an underlying sadness to their interactions and mission as a whole (an excellent family melodrama exists in a different edit), but both actors acquit themselves well, helped by great writing. The two have an easy, lived-in chemistry, and despite not resembling each other all too much, they're perfectly matched as brothers. Pine's Toby is a man of purpose and principal, but he's also a ball of rage as witnessed by an unspoken threat to a loan officer or an outburst at a gas station that's played for the whoa-shit-factor and then for laughs when Foster reacts. Pine is revelatory as Toby, and it's great to see him leave the brash type role he's done well in three Star Treks to Foster (one of his generation's best character actors and arguably the most talented member to emerge from the Disney Channel pipeline) and give his interpretation of the criminal-with-a-soft-side trope while at the same time playing a rake who's responsible for everything that goes wrong. Their motives, and the cleverness of their scheme, become clear fairly early on, but it never gets boring, especially when things start to go horribly wrong and the shots start firing. Only Bridges emerges whole with his typical brilliance, he leaps from the laconic to the rhetorical, making even the shady brim of his hat speak volumes.Set in very dusty Texas (though shot, and shot incredibly well, in New Mexico), in a series of fewer-than-one horse towns, the film stars Pine and Ben Foster as outlaw brothers, Toby and Tanner Howard, racing the clock to knock over a few banks. The director, David Mackenzie, gives each of his actors time to shine and fills the film with picturesque details, but the movie might as well be a table read set before a green screen. The script, by Taylor Sheridan, piles a load of snappy incidents and tangy dialogue on this neo-Western, neo-noir setup the action is as schematic and artificial as a chess game, and the characters have as much identity as its pieces. The brothers set out to raise the money by robbing a bunch of the bank’s branches, and Marcus Hamilton (Jeff Bridges), a marshal on the verge of retirement, sets out to stop them. They’re also pissed off at the Texas Midlands Bank, which will foreclose on her ranch unless they can fork over forty-three thousand dollars by the end of the week. The Howard brothers, of West Texas-Toby (Chris Pine), who’s divorced and unemployed, and Tanner (Ben Foster), who’s fresh out of prison-are in mourning for their mother.
