Review of Hell or High Water (2016) by Sean P — 28 Apr 2017

I had such a great time with this movie!

Another reviewer wrote "The best movie the Coen brothers never made", and I laughed out loud. Perfect! The cinematography and feel of this film reminded me of No Country For Old Men in all the best ways possible.

Normally, plot holes and small continuity errors drive me crazy, but this movie was so much fun it just didn't matter to me. In the third act it becomes apparent that the entire premise of the film is ludicrous, but it didn't bother me one bit. I'll discuss it later in the spoilers section. The last time I enjoyed a movie as much as this one that had so many plot problems was Denzel Washington's The Equalizer. Once he and the terrorists started battling it out in the home center, I realized I was watching Die Hard In A Home Depot, and just relaxed and enjoyed myself. To this day, I can't walk down any aisle in a Home Depot without noticing all the ways I could kill people with what is on the shelves.

Also, if you ever find yourself needing to launder any money, PLEASE don't use this film as a "how to" guide. You'll be in cuffs before you get out the door.

So, I really enjoyed Ben Foster's and Chris Pine's performances. I've never really been a fan of Chris Pine's work, but he shows real range here in his understated performance, and he got the West Texas accent right! The interplay between Pine's Toby and Foster's Tanner is well-written and excellently acted. You'll believe they're brothers with a lifetime of love and hate and respect and torment between them.

The high point of the film though, is Jeff Bridges' Ranger Marcus, and the banter between him and his long-suffering, but subtly counterpunching Alberto, played with an understated brilliance by Gil Birmingham. The older Bridges gets, the more interesting he gets, in my opinion, and this may well be his best. If you enjoyed his interpretation of Rooster Gogburn in the remake of True Grit, you're gonna love him here!

There wasn't a bad performance in the film, and several of the bit players were amazing! Katy Mixon's pragmatic waitress Jenny Ann was an absolute delight, and Margaret Bowman stole the show as the waitress at the T-Bone Steakhouse (guess what they serve there?).

I also absolutely LOVED the way the film ended. It had a little touch of Coen brothers, except you could understand it. I'm not gonna say any more, I don't want to give even a bit of it away.

I simply cannot understand how this film didn't do better at the box office. I just punched myself in the face for not going to see it in the theater.

SPOILERS ** SPOILERS ** SPOILERS ** SPOILERS ** SPOILERS **.

So, the primary premise early in the film is, the Texas Midland Bank screwed their mother on a reverse mortgage and is about to foreclose on it, so they're robbing Texas Midland branches, only so they can pay it off with Texas Midland money. Great premise. Frontier justice. The little guy fights back against The Man.

Later, we learn there's oil on the land, and Toby wants get this done to set his sons up Jed Clampett-style. That kills the entire premise. The oil on the land opened up so many other ways they could have gotten the ranch out of hock that didn't involve robbing banks.

They could easily have negotiated an advance out of the oil company. Even if the oil company decided to wait them out in the hope of getting a better deal from Texas Midland, they only needed a hundred grand. They could easily have found a bank to take their future oil revenues from that deal as collateral on a loan, and if not, investors would have lined up around the block to do it.

Someone I was discussing this said doing it my way wouldn't have given them the revenge they desired. That's true, but Toby's primary motivation was to set his sons up. Doing that without the risk of getting killed (and failing to set the boys up) is a much smarter play. Then, with the boys playing around in their new Jethro Bodine cement pond, there's plenty of time (and funds) for revenge.

You know what? I don't care. The truth is, I don't think they even needed the whole oil thing. If they'd just had Toby and Tanner's mother leave the ranch to her grandsons, getting their birthright out of hock and getting revenge on the bank for screwing their Momma would have been more than enough motivation for the brothers; maybe even a better, more hard-bitten one. Put Toby's sons living with their mother in a dilapidated trailer house and that ranch looks like a big step up. Anyway, that's why I gave it to them. It's a detail the rest of the story needs to work, and the rest of the story is so damned good I just don't care.

The next big hole is how they laundered the money through the casino. I work in a casino, and I promise you, everybody with some money needin' a little washin' has thought of walking into a casino, buying a bunch of chips, waiting awhile, then cashin' 'em back out. It would be spotted instantly. You can't move anywhere near that kind of money through a casino with IDs being required. Reports would be made. There are cameras EVERYWHERE, and it's the first place law enforcement would look.

They needed it to make the story work though, so I gave 'em a pass. I look at it like going to a strip club and having a triple-D stripper with crossed-eyes coming up and offering me two-for-one table dances. Let's just say I'm not going to be spending a lot of time looking at her eyes.

There's more. Burying the stolen cars they used in the robberies is a guarantee of being caught. You don't think the cops might have a question or two about that big, car-sized newly filled-in hole on the property at the heart of this?

Still it was a neat visual, and it helped establish the amount of planning that went into what they were doing without taking up a whole lot of time, so again, I gladly give it to them.

They got all the big stuff right, so it's easy to give 'em a pass on the little stuff they got wrong.

Great movie!