Hell Or High Water

A glance at the 2016 film noir and Western lovechild by David Mackenzie

Hell Or High Water by David Mackenzie is an excellent movie, using excellent talent, cinematography, setting, and storytelling to create a movie so simple, any simpleton could follow, yet still so well written into it's simplicity to allow film critics to rest easy.

Preface, of course this contains spoilers for the film, though I will try to keep them minor. Anyone who hasn't seen Hell Or High Water, should. It's on Netflix, rated R, contains 1 brief sex scene that is so out of focus so as to be meaningless, but prolific violence and 34 total f-bombs and surprisingly less use of other profanity allows it to deserve it's rating. Not for everyone, but for those not scared of a little language, should absolutely sit down for it's 1 hour 42 minute run and be held rapt by Jeff Bridges, Chris Pine, Ben Foster, and Gil Birmingham run cat and mouse through dusty, beaten Texan towns, body held in constant attention, as anything could go south at any moment.

Artistically, this film has a four main colors: brown, gray, white, and the blue of the open Texas sky. This constant restriction of color, rarely allowing anything besides common clothing past this color palette maintains the dusty, almost bleak tone of the film. The clothing is average, and everyday. The most formal clothing seen is Jeff Bridge's Texas Ranger outfit, most wearing jeans, boots, and tartan patterned button ups. The costuming and color choice solidify that this is indeed middle of nowhere Texas, where people survive rather than thrive, emphasizing the plight of Chris Pine and Ben Foster's characters as they struggle for the bare minimum. The camera plays itself almost as if it is member of every conversation, rarely peering through openings, glass, or any odd location, wanting to be unnoticed by the audience. By keeping the camerawork simple and almost bland in it's restriction of creative movement it requires the audience to instead appreciate the bleak scenery, creating a sense of realism that this movie maintains excellently.

This movie focuses on 4 main characters: Chris Pine and Ben Foster, two brothers (Toby and Tanner Howard, respectively) who are robbing banks to get enough money to stop the banks from foreclosing on their dying mother's home; and Jeff Bridges and Gil Birmingham, two Texas Rangers (Marcus Hamilton and Alberto Parker, respectively) hunting down the crafty bank robbers. As the movie continues, you slowly understand the motives of the brothers, and are the ones who add the heavier dramatic tones to the movie. The Texas Rangers joke between each other, slowly growing to like one another more, and are the ones who tend to add more comedic tones. These two groups slowly trail one another across empty Texas desert, and combining the cat and mouse plot, and using traditional film techniques somehow manage to create an extremely pleasing film, in the fact that it is a perfect culmination of past films of the same ilk. Using the same techniques, and applying higher levels of mastery takes this movie above and beyond, no longer a run of the mill heist, but a perfection of their genres, and then a perfection of the amalgamation of the two genres.