Hell or High Water (15.)
Directed by David Mackenzie.
Starring Chris Pine, Ben Foster, Jeff Bridges, Gil Birmingham and Marin Ireland. 102 mins.
With one massive exception, Cormac McCarthy has not fared well in the movies. Hell and High Water is certainly not a McCarthy piece (the title is the wrong kind of blunt and dull) but it does take an entertaining and enormously effective stroll through some of his preferred territory: a modern day Texas where the western archetypes that forged the country are trying to deal with a landscape that is more brutal and savage than in the wild west days.
Pine and Foster are two brothers on a low key bank robbing spree. Foster is the wild one just out of prison; Pine is the quiet one with a plan to secure their future and save the family farm from being repossessed by the banks. On their trail is lawman Bridges, just weeks from retirement, and his partner Alberto (Birmingham.) Bridges is beginning to look a little like Slim Pickens and says things like “let's get some giddy up music on,” when they are set for a car chase.
Hell and High Water (originally entitled Comancheria) is a slow burn western thriller that gives you plenty of what you’d expect, but with enough of a twist to make it special. The acting is all laconic, and the Texas landscape is beautifully caught. It probably hammers away a little too hard on its theme – how the banks are taking the land away from the ancestors of the cowboys who took it from the Indians - but it is a worthwhile theme. The irony of course is that this thoughtful and nuanced piece plays perfectly into the Trump narrative about the American individualistic spirit being worn down by the forces of globalisation.
Directed by David Mackenzie.
Starring Chris Pine, Ben Foster, Jeff Bridges, Gil Birmingham and Marin Ireland. 102 mins.
With one massive exception, Cormac McCarthy has not fared well in the movies. Hell and High Water is certainly not a McCarthy piece (the title is the wrong kind of blunt and dull) but it does take an entertaining and enormously effective stroll through some of his preferred territory: a modern day Texas where the western archetypes that forged the country are trying to deal with a landscape that is more brutal and savage than in the wild west days.
Pine and Foster are two brothers on a low key bank robbing spree. Foster is the wild one just out of prison; Pine is the quiet one with a plan to secure their future and save the family farm from being repossessed by the banks. On their trail is lawman Bridges, just weeks from retirement, and his partner Alberto (Birmingham.) Bridges is beginning to look a little like Slim Pickens and says things like “let's get some giddy up music on,” when they are set for a car chase.
Hell and High Water (originally entitled Comancheria) is a slow burn western thriller that gives you plenty of what you’d expect, but with enough of a twist to make it special. The acting is all laconic, and the Texas landscape is beautifully caught. It probably hammers away a little too hard on its theme – how the banks are taking the land away from the ancestors of the cowboys who took it from the Indians - but it is a worthwhile theme. The irony of course is that this thoughtful and nuanced piece plays perfectly into the Trump narrative about the American individualistic spirit being worn down by the forces of globalisation.
