There’s a new bank-robber movie that’s good enough to survive what may be the worst title in recent memory: Hell or High Water, a name that evokes precisely nothing about the picture even though it refers to a throwaway line spoken in its third act. At least, back in the day, when Hollywood came up with a bad title, it really came up with a bad title—like Dirty Dingus Magee, The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh, The Great Scout and Cathouse Thursday, and The Duchess and the Dirtwater Fox, all names evidently designed to repel moviegoers rather than lure them into theaters. Hell or High Water is merely a forgettable title, and I should know, because I forgot it when I was trying to tell someone to go see it a few hours after I’d done so.
Hell or High Water is a throwback to the kinds of sharp, smart, unpretentious crime pictures Hollywood sometimes made in the 1970s, right down to the presence of 1970s kid icon Jeff Bridges in a leading role. He starred in at least two such films then: the wonderful Last American Hero, about a kid from a moonshining family who becomes a stock-car racer, and Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, in which he teamed up to pull heists with Clint Eastwood. No longer the feckless boy of Nixon’s America, Bridges is here a senior citizen running out of time in Obama’s. He’s three weeks from retirement, a canny and lonely childless widower terrified of how little his life will matter after he lays down his badge.
Those older movies and others like them—Charley Varrick with Walter Matthau, Gator with Burt Reynolds, and the no-stars smash of 1974 called Macon County Line—all take place in a White America already in the rear-view mirror decades before Breaking Bad, Hillbilly Elegy, or the Donald Trump voter. Hell or High Water is set entirely in small towns across the dusty confines of West Texas, including the town of Archer City, where The Last Picture Show (with Jeff Bridges!) was filmed back in 1970.
The road signs in these towns promote second mortgages, and buy-backs, and other commercial transaction possibilities following the real-estate meltdown of 2008. Bridges is called in because a pair of robbers is hitting a series of branch banks in these towns. They go in, take only cash from the teller drawers rather than packets of traceable money, and vamoose. Because these third-rate banks are changing over from VHS surveillance tapes to digital systems and haven’t gotten the hang of it yet, there are no pictures of the bad guys.
Unlike Bridges, we know who’s behind the robberies, because the movie begins with a bravura sequence (the handiwork of the terrific Scottish director David Mackenzie), in which we see the two thieves park outside a bank, rob it in two minutes, and drive away. They’re brothers—the quietly brooding Chris Pine (better known as the rebooted Captain Kirk in the recent Star Treks) and the insanely intense Ben Foster (whose specialty is playing insanely intense characters in movies like 3:10 to Yuma and Alpha Dog). Foster is just out of prison, and he’s signed on to help his little brother Pine, who’s collecting money for a purpose we only come to understand later in the picture.
We get a sense of the torment of their lives as we go: a mother who has spent years dying a painful death, widowed by a father so abusive that Foster actually found it necessary to kill him in what is passed off as a hunting accident. Pine is penniless and owes his ex-wife thousands in child support, which has kept him from seeing his sons. They are left behind. But they’re smart and interesting, as is the screenplay by Taylor Sheridan. They take their ill-gotten gains to an Indian casino across the border in Oklahoma, use the cash they’ve purloined to buy chips, and then cash in the chips. They know what they’re doing.
The movie cuts between them and Bridges, who begins to see a pattern in their behavior. The robbers only go after the branches of a single entity, Texas Midlands Bank. It’s the same bank from which their mother got a reverse mortgage for the ramshackle family ranch—a deal that fleeced her and will leave her sons with nothing. Unless they act. Which they do, with unexpectedly tragic and positive results.
Hell or High Water is not a masterpiece, as The Last Picture Show is, but compared with the tiresome and repetitive fare dominating the multiplexes these days—superhero this, comic book that, animated the other thing—it seems extraordinarily fresh and vivid. And it is capped off with a perfectly rendered final scene that might earn Bridges his second Oscar. So go see it, if you can remember the name.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard‘s movie critic.
