Hell or High Water

You needn’t watch the trailer for Hell or High Water—it gives away too much of the plot. All you need to know is that Jeff Bridges stars in this movie, and he knocks it out of the park.

The bare outlines: In this modern-era bank robbery tale, two brothers (Chris Pine and Ben Foster) are holding up banks in Texas. Two Texas Rangers, Marcus (Bridges) and Alberto (Gil Birmingham), are on their trail.

“They bopped you in the schnozzola, huh?” Marcus drawls to one bank manager nursing a busted nose from one of the brothers’ stickups.

The rural Texas of this movie is beat-down, poor, and largely white. The bitterness of disenfranchisement seeps into everything, starting with graffiti in the opening shot of the movie that reads, “Three tours in Iraq but no bailout for people like us.” Warning: The film is rated R for a lot of shootout violence (particularly jarring after the Dallas attack), cursing, and one very brief, out-of-focus sex scene.

Hell or High Water has the feel of a Coen brothers movie—outlaws on the run again—with less zaniness. Some might think the story is about banks. It’s really about what generations pass on to each other: sin, poverty, the family business. Cowboys find their children uninterested in roping steer. Children can’t pay their aging parents’ bills. In one confrontation, one of the many Texans with a concealed carry permit pulls out a gun to fight back, while a teenager pulls out her phone to text for help.

Despite the serious matters at hand, I laughed multiple times—including at Marcus’ frustration over contemporary Christian music coming on the radio of his truck at an inopportune moment. This film succeeds in weaving all the violence and trouble with a little needed laughter.