Ten years ago this month, Hell or High Water opened in theaters and quietly became one of the best American films of its decade. A lean, sunbaked crime story set in West Texas, it followed two brothers robbing branch after branch of the bank about to take their family's farm, and turned a modest budget into one of 2016's most acclaimed releases, a 97% on Rotten Tomatoes among the evidence.
David Mackenzie directed from a screenplay by Taylor Sheridan, casting Chris Pine as the divorced, quietly furious Toby Howard and Ben Foster as his volatile brother Tanner, an ex convict with nothing left to lose. Jeff Bridges anchors the film as Marcus Hamilton, a Texas Ranger just weeks from retirement who treats the case like one last excuse to matter. It was Sheridan's second produced screenplay after Sicario, and the middle chapter of what he has called a loose trilogy about the fallout of the American frontier, completed a year later by his directing debut, Wind River.
The film's Texas is full of boarded up storefronts and billboards advertising debt relief, and that choice is deliberate. Sheridan grew up near Waco and wrote the script in the shadow of the 2008 financial crisis, flipping the usual outlaw story so the audience ends up rooting for the men robbing the bank rather than the bank foreclosing on them. Fittingly, the production could not actually afford Texas. Every scene was shot across the state line in New Mexico standing in for the towns the script describes, a budget workaround Sheridan later joked came from shooting as close to the real thing as the money allowed.
What holds the film together is Mackenzie's restraint. He shoots the robberies and the shootout that follows with a clear sense of space rather than jittery urgency, and lets Bridges, Pine and Foster carry the tension through character rather than plot mechanics. Gil Birmingham, as Marcus's long suffering partner Alberto, gets some of the film's driest, sharpest lines, a reminder that the film is funnier than its subject suggests.
The reception has held up too. Hell or High Water earned four Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Sheridan's screenplay and a supporting actor nod for Bridges. A decade on, it remains one of the clearest cases for revisiting a smart, character driven crime film instead of waiting for the next one to come along.
