Hell or High Water (2016) 💵🏦💓

“I never met nobody who got away with anything, ever. You?”

Hell or High Water is a modern western by scottish filmmaker David Mackenzie that stars Chris Pine and Ben Foster as two desperate brothers who decide to rob banks professionally. Jeff Bridges and Gil Birminham play Texas Rangers who chase the brothers across Texas. Though the bank robbers and the law enforcement officers are at odds, the film encourages you to root for both to succeed in their goals — an impossibility that makes for a tense viewing experience.

This is the second film, after Sicario, written by actor-turned-writer Taylor Sheridan, and is part of a trilogy of films about a kind of “new american frontier”. Like Sicario, Hell or High Water has a unique plot structure, and flips a lot of expectations of the western genre on its head. For a movie so tense with such a violent concept, the actors bring a sense of passivity to their rolls. Also like Sicario, the concept of “villains” in this movie is muddied — though the characters are rough and imperfect, it’s clear that the system is at fault for putting these people into such desperate situations. Though they all make deliberate choices throughout the film, it never feels like they have much choice at all.
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