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Reviewed by:
  • Hell Or High Water dir. by David MacKenzie
  • Michael C. Reiff
Hell Or High Water (2016) Directed by David MacKenzie Distributed by CBS Films www.hellorhighwater.movie 102 minutes

Adam McKay’s 2015 film The Big Short takes a number of meta-breaks to explain difficult financial concepts. In one of these breaks, actress Selena Gomez and the economist Richard H. Thaler stand by a Black Jack table in a casino, and explain Synthetic Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs). As a crowd of onlookers make side bets on whether Gomez’s bet will bear fruit, and a crowd behind that crowd bet on the first crowd’s bets, the implications of the Synthetic CDO scene become obvious. It suggests that the practice of Synthetic CDPs is like gambling: both lead to risky behavior on a grand scale, while illustrating that it sometimes helps to have an approachable, fun, and flashy conduit to successfully convey a heady concept.

In David MacKenzie’s recent 2016 heist thriller Hell Or High Water, a working class rancher named Toby, played by Chris Pine (who just reprised his role as pop-culture icon Captain Kirk in Star Trek: Beyond) launders ill-gotten gains through a casino. Toby and his brother Tanner have been robbing local banks in central Texas, and filtering the cash through tribal casinos to cover their tracks. But lest we think Hell Or High Water is simply literalizing the metaphor McKay creates in The Big Short, it’s important to take in the wider, Texas-sized vista of the film. Toby and Tanner are trying to save the family farm, which they feel will be “stolen” via foreclosure by the same bank they are robbing. Toby and Tanner are struggling in a blighted economy in a pocket of America that is pock-marked with foreclosure and pawnshop signs, the remnants of oil-boom times and housing bubbles. Hell Or High Water does for post-Great Recession America what The Big Short did for the Wall Street meltdown of 2008. Adam McKay used the tropes of modern meta-comedy and explained the seemingly unexplainable. In Hell Or High Water, MacKenzie and screenwriter Taylor Sheridan use the tropes of the thriller and heist movie—combining elements from Rififi and The Town to name a few—to create compelling entertainment that reflects our contemporary anxieties and the historical implications of the current economic blight.

From the first shot of the film, MacKenzie’s cinematic impulses are geared toward local texture and regional economic despair. The opening of the film is a tightly-focused [End Page 106] tracking shot through a back parking lot, following a bank teller through her morning ritual of smoking a cigarette, passing by the “Big Sale!” signs in windows of a neighboring store, and opening the small, sole, vibrant business of the town—the Midland Branch Bank. As Toby and Tanner descend upon her, the quiet muscularity of the heist sequence evokes Jules Dassan’s aesthetic in Rififi—spare, exacting, and focused on the mechanics and mistakes in heists. As the pair make their getaway, they race by billboards that beckon easy credit, and a deja-vu-inducing ménage of nearly identical ranch homes with “For Sale” signs adorning their chain-link fences. Tanner whoops for joy at their first heist, but Toby demands that he slow down and play it safe. He growls at Tanner to recognize that they are amateurs in a financial and criminal landscape that is impersonal and desolate. Tanner seems to understand the real truth: that small thieves who understand the lay of the land can just as easily hide in plain sight as the larger economic crimes they are passing by.

As Mackenzie’s camera hugs tightly on the roaring engine of Tanner’s Firebird while the car jostles through neglected back alleys and tattered flags, neither character explicitly reflects on the Robin-Hood nature of their misdeeds. Tanner is simply helping Toby save the family farm so that he can give it to his estranged wife and sons. In fact, on the whole, Taylor Sheridan’s script doesn’t allow for easy moralizing or introspection. One might expect this would be the...

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