Movie Review: 'Hell or High Water'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Armed robbery.
Those are the two key words that, for viewers like me, keep this otherwise well-made film from being enjoyable.
Hell or High Water is strongly acted, interestingly shot, and technically admirable.
But it asks us to treat armed robbery as whimsical and inconsequential.
No can do.
That said, there's plenty to appreciate if you're not bothered by the uncomfortable amorality.
Hell or High Water is a crime-spree thriller about a pair of brothers, Toby and Tanner Howard, played respectively by Chris Pine and Ben Foster, who, in the film's first scene, rob a small-town bank in West Texas wearing ski masks.
They're obviously desperate, these low-rent bandits, but Tanner clearly seems to be enjoying himself, obviously a hair-trigger impulse away from committing murder. Cannons don't come more loose.
Toby, the older and more serious bro, is doing this because he intends to forestall foreclosure of his family's farm by the greedy and merciless bank, especially now that he's discovered oil on the property.
He intends to secure the financial future of his two kids, whom he's had little to do with since his divorce from their mother.
As for Tanner, an ex-con with barely concealed sociopathic tendencies, anything could happen at any time.
True, they're both trying to hold on to what they have. But they also want something more and to get it, they're willing to steal other people's money and perhaps, just because it might present itself as necessary, to kill one or more innocent people.
Toby and Tanner, financially strapped, may justify their behavior in an era of vanishing prosperity as a justifiable response to the hard-hearted banks, but that doesn't mean that we have to.
Am I supposed to root for these guys?
Check, please.
British director David Mackenzie (Young Adam, Asylum, Starred Up), working from a script by Sicario screenwriter Taylor Sheridan, establishes an authentic sense of place jn a succession of dying towns. And he doesn't shy away from the gritty violence, which is unsettling, as it should be. But something is clearly out of whack.
Any film that offers innocent civilians caught in a crossfire – more than once -- and then moves on as if someone just dented a fender has to answer for its obnoxious attitude.
What helps but can't quite solve this problem is the knowing performance of Jeff Bridges as the about-to-retire Texas Ranger on the trail of the thieves. His sly, witty, sarcastic turn is a breath of fresh air and provides a bit of comic relief. But it's not enough.
The romanticizing of armed robbery just doesn't play and this approach undermines the film so that the climax cannot possibly deliver in the way intended.
So we'll withdraw 2 stars out of 4 for a neo-western thriller that, come Hell or High Water, sticks to its guns and thus robs itself of its own power.
