Rating summary

Movie		4.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		3.0
Overall		4.5

Hell or High Water Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman November 17, 2016

Bonnie and Clyde was one of the most epochal films of its era, and one reason why is because it totally skewed expectations for how an audience should react to a traditional cops versus robbers scenario. While there had certainly been films that had celebrated “scoundrels” if not outright criminals before (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre), Arthur Penn’s 1967 opus made the putative “bad guys” the “good guys” in a way that had never really been seen before. There’s something at least a little similar going on in Hell or High Water, a really interesting effort from the pen of Taylor Sheridan, the writer who brought another passel of morally ambiguous characters brilliantly to life in last year’s Sicario. Hell or High Water begins with an apparently banal view of a largely abandoned Texas town where a dusty late sixties or early seventies muscle car seems to be roaming aimlessly if a bit recklessly as an older woman gets out of her car and walks toward a building’s exterior ashtray to douse her cigarette. As soon as the camera pans past the building’s sign, showing it to be a branch of Texas Midlands Bank, there’s a really wonderfully evoked if subliminal feeling of dread that immediately rises up, and sure enough, as soon as the woman walks around to the front door of the place, two masked men sneak up behind her, put a gun to her head and announce that they’re there to rob the institution. Things don’t go exactly as planned, though, since it’s early in the morning, and the woman doesn’t have access to the bank’s vault. She gets into a distressing conversation with the two thieves, calling them “stupid”, which doesn’t sit very well with one of the robbers. The other robber seems at least a little calmer and gets the woman to tell them when the bank manager will be arriving. Suffice it to say that after a brief delay, the robbers do emerge victorious from their tribulations, taking off in that dusty car and peeling off their ski masks to reveal that they are brothers Toby (Chris Pine) and Tanner Howard (Ben Foster). Already Sheridan’s screenplay has smartly detailed the siblings’ characters and interrelationship, something that will continue to inform this interesting film which is part caper scenario but at least as much a pure character study of both the brothers and, later, the two Texas Rangers who are tasked with bringing them to justice.

The opening robbery sequence has more than adequately shown that Tanner, the one who got upset about being called stupid, and who later gives the bank manager a serious blow to the face with the butt of his pistol just to show who’s in charge, is the more volatile of the brothers. Toby, on the other hand, seems a little unsure of his criminal life, and indeed it’s soon revealed that Tanner is an ex-con while Toby has been the “good boy”, managing the (decrepit) family farm and nursing the boys’ mother, who has recently died from a terminal illness. There’s already a sadness underlying these characters which may help to foster sympathy, but once the reason for their crime spree is completely itemized, the two become even more understandable and perhaps even defensible in a way that even Bonnie and Clyde aren’t in the Penn film.

As the brothers’ crime spree continues, an aging Texas Ranger named Marcus Hamilton (Jeff Bridges) is assigned to catch the thieves, since the FBI doesn’t feel the robberies warrant their involvement. Marcus is close to (forced) retirement, and his partner Alberto Parker (Gil Birmingham), with whom Marcus has a decidedly politically incorrect bantering relationship, thinks this case will be a nice way for Marcus to exit his career on a high point. That starts what is in essence a kind of cat and mouse game that fills the central portion of the film, but, again, Hell or High Water is less concerned with crime film genre tropes than it is with exploring the relationships between these two sets of partners.

Without spoiling some of the context which gives Hell or High Water its really authentic ambience, an almost genetic predisposition toward poverty and perhaps usury plays into the plot dynamics, something that again manages to make the brothers more sympathetic than they might otherwise be. While the film perhaps doesn’t explore the characters of Marcus and Alberto quite as much as it does the Howard brothers, Sheridan’s screenplay still makes both of these lawmen fully realized characters, albeit more in throwaway bits like Marcus’ nonstop ribbing of Alberto’s bifurcated ancestry. (There's other kind of whimsical humor in a running gag that sees the brothers burying their series of getaway cars.) The film wends its way to an expected showdown, but there’s more of an emotional tether to events than tends to be the case in less nuanced crime centered films, simply because Sheridan has so artfully crafted this quartet of outcasts.

There’s an elegiac quality to Hell or High Water that is one of its strongest assets. This is most overt in Marcus’ character, a guy who’s at the end of his career (and maybe not that far from being at the end of his life), but it also plays into Toby’s story, as he attempts to provide a better life for his estranged wife and kids. The bittersweet emotional ambience of Hell or High Water is only magnified by shots of wide open vistas (New Mexico evidently subbing for Texas), where man’s attempts to forge something akin to civilization seem woefully inadequate. Performances all around are superb in this film (I wouldn’t be surprised to see some of them recognized at Academy Awards time), and director David Mackenzie keeps things moving along at a brisk, at times even breathless, pace.

Hell or High Water Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Hell or High Water is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Lionsgate Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.40:1. The film was digitally captured with the Arri Alexa XT and finished at a 2K DI, and there's an appealing consistency to detail levels throughout this presentation. A lot of the film is understandably skewed toward dusty yellows, beiges and ochres, giving the film a kind of generally buttery or amber appearance, at least in the many outdoor scenes. The palette is generally pretty natural looking, though some of the interior scenes, while not graded, bear the look of the ambient lighting sources (some casino scenes therefore have a kind of unnaturally garish appearance which can look a little murky at times). Close-ups offer great levels of fine detail, and some of the aerial and other exterior shots offer some excellent depth of field. There are no instances of image instability and no issues with compression artifacts.

Hell or High Water Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Hell or High Water features an occasionally pretty boisterous, even raucous, sounding DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track, one that derives a lot of energy and nice panning activity when the brothers make their getaways in their souped up cars. A couple of scenes involve gunfire (some pretty aggressive in a suitably Texan way), and those offer some punchy lower end. Dialogue is presented cleanly and clearly and effects and score are well prioritized and add to a winningly immersive listening experience.

Hell or High Water Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Enemies Forever: The Characters of Hell or High Water (1080p; 13:36) is an above average featurette with some good interviews with Sheridan.


• Visualizing the Heart of America (1080p; 9:28) focuses on some of the location work.


• Damaged Heroes: The Performance of Hell or High Water (1080p; 12:24) is listed that way on the menu, but bears the more accurate plural Performances in the featurette itself, which of course centers on the characters and the actors portraying them.


• Red Carpet Premiere (1080p; 1:53) has brief footage of the Austin debut interspersed with fairly long clips from the film.


• Filmmaker Q & A (1080p; 29:51) is from a Los Angeles screening hosted by Time's Sam Lansky and featuring Mackenzie, Bridges, Pine and Birmingham.

Hell or High Water Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Hell or High Water makes a couple of missteps along the way, including a couple of needless vignettes involving secondary characters in a local restaurant and, later, at a casino the brothers go to in order to launder their ill gotten gains. But generally speaking, this is a really well crafted and extremely involving character study that pretends to be about cops versus robbers but which really has a much more subtle, introspective center focusing on how siblings or quasi-siblings interact with each other. The film has a really unique feel for its (supposed) Texan locations, and performances are absolutely top notch. Technical merits are first rate, and Hell or High Water comes Highly recommended.