‘Hell Or High Water’ Is The Perfect Antidote To All The Crappy Blockbusters Of 2016

Within the first minute of Hell Or High Water, it’s clear we’re in steady hands. The opening shot follows a beat-up car as it pulls into the deserted parking lot of a Texas Midlands Bank, past a wall graffitied with “three tours in Iraq but no bailout for folks like us”. Despite the sense of baking heat, the mood isn’t exactly sunny.

What follows is a workaday bank robbery by two twitchy figures in black hoodies, ski masks and plastic gloves. They do a blunt and effective job, neither slick nor inept, and tear away with only the untraceable cash from the drawers. For all its jeopardy, the sequence is grounded in a down-at-heel Texan drollness. Questioned later on the colour of the perpetrators, the bank employee (a scene-stealing Dale Dickey) responds with, “Their skin or their souls?”

This is the hard-bitten, weather-beaten tone that hangs over Hell Or High Water; a movie that inhabits a different universe from most of this year’s big-ticket releases. That is to say, it occupies our own — the one adjacent to Marvel Studios and DC Entertainment’s Great Battle Of IP.

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Hell Or High Water, which opens in cinemas this week, is directed by Scottish filmmaker David Mackenzie, whose previous outing Starred Up was an unsparing free-fall into the UK prison system. (Watch it in a double-bill with Animal Kingdom to steel yourself for Ben Mendelsohn’s villainy in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.)

This time around, Mackenzie is working from a screenplay by Taylor Sheridan, who last visited the American badlands for 2015’s drug war drama Sicario. Nick Cave and Warren Ellis provide a score every bit as brooding and plaintive as you’d expect. This all comes together as a terrific example of small-bore filmmaking in a year of superheroes razing cities to the ground.

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Bank-Robbing Brothers and Texas Rangers

The two men sweating under those ski masks are Tanner and Toby Howard. They plan to hit a string of West Texas banks, stealing just enough to save their family ranch from foreclosure following their mother’s death.

As played by Ben Foster, Tanner is the wilder older sibling — a practiced criminal and prodigious drinker with a fondness for grubby flannel shirts, petrol station sunnies and gunplay. He’s recently out of prison and raring to make up for lost time. In one sharp scene, his hair-trigger reaction to being shaken awake is to instantly start swinging.

Toby, the dutiful father who’s never been in trouble with the law, is a scuffed-up and stubbly Chris Pine. He plays Toby with a downcast head, talking into his chest as if to hide his handsomeness. Robbing banks is Toby’s last resort to buy his sons a future, and Tanner is more than happy to help out. Otherwise, their familial bond is communicated primarily in the shared enjoyment of countless beers.

(It’s testament to the movie’s even tone that Pine’s matinee idol presence isn’t distracting. The production only had him for two-and-a-half weeks in-between his blockbuster commitments, and Mackenzie shot his scenes in narrative order. With Star Trek and Wonder Woman on his slate, this was the star’s mini-break with a director who apparently avoids clapboards and monitors on set.)

Tanner and Toby are pursued by a pair of Texas Rangers — Marcus Hamilton (Jeff Bridges) and Alberto Parker (Gil Birmingham) — who share their own brotherly rapport. While Marcus maintains a steady stream of off-colour jokes about his partner’s “half-breed” Mexican-Comanche heritage, their bickering never rises above a low simmer.

Birmingham plays Alberto with quiet grace, while Marcus follows True Grit‘s Rooster Cogburn in the Jeff Bridges lineage of wizened lawmen. You can gauge Bridges’ comfort in the role by the way he sits down; he crosses a leg and hooks his cowboy hat on his boot, all in one fluid motion.

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The World of West Texas

“God, I love West Texas,” Marcus deadpans early in the unfolding action.

For most viewers in Australia, the world of Hell Or High Water will feel both foreign and familiar. All that open space is reminiscent of the Australian outback, whether real or imagined on-screen in the likes of Kiss Or Kill and The Proposition.

Mackenzie and his English cinematographer Giles Nuttgens share an outsider’s attentiveness to this terrain. (Despite the West Texas setting, filming actually took place in the neighbouring state of New Mexico.) Their camera is drawn to the new realities of the Old West: the open plains dotted with oil pumpjacks, billboards promising Fast Cash and Debt Relief, and horseback riders sharing the roads with muscle cars and SUVs. The interior of a gaudy highway casino is shot with as much attention as a brilliant desert sunset.

Sheridan’s script also revels in the specificity of the place. After Sicario proved his talent for matching beautiful-yet-hostile landscapes with gritty dialogue, Hell Or High Water allows for a little more levity. Bridges is given the chewiest lines as the old-timer moving dryly towards retirement, and he savours every one. (“That looks like a man who could foreclose on a house,” Marcus quips when he spies a bank manager to question.)

In its laconic middle stretch, the screenplay also finds space for characters like Margaret Bowman’s spectacularly salty waitress, who provides the movie’s funniest scene. Her severe run-through of The T-Bone Café’s don’ts (there are no dos) is played for comedy and colour, not to propel the narrative. It’s a scene that makes you wonder how many similar moments could shine in Hell Or High Water as a TV miniseries.

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Blockbuster Bummers and Small-Screen Smarts

It’s telling that Hell Or High Water resembles the slow-burning, character-driven feel of TV. This year has, by and large, been a bummer for blockbuster movies. The diminishing returns of the loosely-defined US summer season have inspired countless doomy thinkpieces, with Suicide Squad as the nadir and the likes of X-Men: Apocalypse, Independence Day: Resurgence, Warcraft and Jason Bourne trailing behind in the “we’re not mad, just disappointed” category.

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In this maelstrom of sequels, reboots and universe expansion, a heist thriller made for $12 million can’t help but feel like a throwback. Hell Or High Water is that solidly built, mid-budget genre movie you used to see more often in cinemas. In 2016, we’ve come to expect its style of human-scale storytelling from FX or Netflix.

Perhaps because of this, Hell Or High Water feels in some ways restricted by the economy of its running time. While the story is streamlined, its themes would benefit from more breathing room. Sections of dialogue feel underlined and bolded with ‘Major Idea’, in case we’re too consumed by bank heists to reckon with the hollowing out of the American Dream.

“The film is really a meditation on failure,” Sheridan told The Washington Post, and it also tips its hat to the displacement of the Comanche Nation, the legacy of poverty (“It’s like a disease,” Toby tells Marcus) and vigilante justice from gun-toting citizens in a state of concealed-carry permits. All this is rich territory that a miniseries in the mould of Fargo would have time to truly tease out. The character of Marcus, embodied so completely by Jeff Bridges, also feels worthy of more than 100 minutes.

Of course, Mackenzie and Sheridan set out to make cinema, not TV, but it’s indicative of the current moment that the “what if?” is even in the air. As it stands, Hell Or High Water is a lean and slyly funny antidote to months of bloated blockbusters. In West Texas, they still make them like they used to.

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Hell or High Water is in select cinemas from October 27.

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Jack Tregoning is a freelance writer based in New York. He tweets at @JackTregoning.