We’re in a small, sun-baked town in Texas. The camera slowly makes a 360-degree turn, revealing that the streets are nearly empty, except for two people showing up to work at a bank and a turquoise car that holds two brothers (played by Chris Pine and Ben Foster) who appear to be casing the joint. The stage is set.
I’m reluctant to compare any movie to “Fargo,” because I love “Fargo” so much and because that comparison may raise expectations too high, but “Hell or High Water” has a lot in common with “Fargo”: hapless crooks, a principled investigator (Jeff Bridges here) whose skill should not be underestimated, scenes that shift from irreverent comedy to tense crime drama, a mournful musical score and a moral underpinning that ties it all together, asking, essentially, “How did our society reach the point where we care so little about each other?”.
Right now, I wouldn’t say “Hell or High Water” is as good as “Fargo,” but “Fargo” also took a while to settle in as a masterpiece, and I will say that “Hell or High Water” is very, very good. As the brothers barely escape from one bank job after another and as the sarcastic cop (“They bopped you in the schnozzola, huh? Not very nice,” Bridges says to someone injured during one of the robberies) closes in on them, “Hell or High Water” declines to tell us whose side we should be on. Or, rather, it makes sure we see there’s something to be said for both law and order in this situation — since Pine, in particular, is only breaking the law in a desperate attempt to save his home from unscrupulous moneylenders.
Director David Mackenzie — whose “Hallam Foe” and Tilda Swinton drama “Young Adam” are worth catching up with — packs each frame of “Hell or High Water” with detail. That serves two purposes: It’s a way of making sure we pay attention to everything in a movie where even the minor character of a waitress has something to say (especially since she’s tartly played by Katie Mixon). And, because there are so many interesting things to attend to on-screen, the level of detail means “Hell or High Water” can keep surprising us for its duration. The movie’s about half over, for instance, before it becomes clear who the main characters are.
It may be that the best clue to what’s happening in the melodrama is that elegiac music. Its high and lonesome sounds seem to agree with an ominous comment that Foster makes early in the movie and that shadows the rest of it: “I never met nobody who got away with anything, ever.”
Source: http://www.twincities.com/2016/08/11/hell-or-high-water-movie-review/
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