A Disease Passing from Generation to Generation

Hell or High Water

Welcome back everyone to another issue of Diary of an Angry Nerd! My last three reviews have garnered some positive feedback, so I am very happy about that. Please feel free to contact me about your opinion or question, I feel so honored when people message me. Makes me feel important somehow and you know we all want that. Today I check off another 2017 Best Picture nominee with surprise hit, Hell or High Water.

Hell or High Water is set in present day Western Texas and follows two brothers, Toby (Chris Pine) and Tanner (Ben Foster), who are robbing banks to gather enough money to save their recently deceased mother’s farm. Not only are they robbing banks, but robbing the same bank that is trying to foreclose on the farm. In close pursuit of the two brothers is Texas Ranger Marcus Hamilton (Jeff Bridges), who just happens to be retiring very soon.

Well as simple as that plot is, the story is a little more complex than that and I think that is why I found this film more compelling after I watched it. The film is more about family and the things you are willing to do or sacrifice to make sure that your family is taken care of. Then there is the theme of struggling farm families being swallowed up by banks. All of that is what makes this film more complex than a simple cops and robbers story.  

What’s funny is that I gripe so much about the death of the Western genre, that I have failed to see that it is just reinventing itself in ways of the Neo-Western. I think that it has resonated more on television with shows like Justified and Breaking Bad, but I see that Hollywood is coming around little by little with films like No Country for Old Men and just recently with Logan. Hell or High Water pleasantly fits into this genre beautifully. I have opened my eyes to this new type of Western and I am enjoying it immensely.

Pine and Foster are terrific in this film really capturing the brotherly love that is essential for this film. Though, I am not surprised by Foster’s performance in this film because I have been screaming for years that he is an enormously underrated actor. I will watch anything with Foster in and I always find that I am never disappointed. Pine did not so much as surprise me, but more or less impressed me with encapsulating the more submissive brother, yet the ‘brain’ of the two.

I was also captivated by the visuals that director David Mackenzie gives the audience. The presentation of a desolate Western Texas really adds to the story by immersing the audience into the brother’s world and gives reason as to why someone in a similar situation in that same area would do what these two are doing.

My only real problem with the film is the archetypical ‘sheriff’ chasing after the ‘outlaws’ during his last ride. Nothing wrong with Bridges interpretation of this type of character, but I just wanted him to have some sort of redefining moment or aspect of him that made him stand out among the rest of these characters. I fear that Ranger Hamilton could have been placed in any other Western and you wouldn’t have been able to differentiate between his character and any other one like him.

This is definitely a film for people who like Westerns and is aching for more films from the genre. Pine and Foster were magnificent and Mackenzie draws you into the dirty/poor world so masterfully that I felt like I was back home in the Southwest.

Like I said at the top of this entry, if you have any comments or questions feel free to contact me on my Twitter, Facebook, or Tumblr anytime and I will more than happily respond. Anyway…

Worth Your Time.