Jeff Bridges has become a legend of American cinema during the last forty-some years, and in Hell or High Water, he plays Marcus Hamilton, an old, grumpy, racist Texas ranger who's chasing two bank robbing brothers (Chris Pine and Ben Foster). These two complex criminals are stealing the money from the very bank, Texas Midland Trust, that is about to foreclose on their ranch after their mother's death. The movie wisely comments on the difference (or the lack thereof) between the European settlers who stole the land from the Native Americans and these modern American banks, who so often do the same to the common people that they bleed out over years and years of raised interest rates and ever increasing property taxes. Hamilton's wisecracks about Mexicans and Native Americans are effectively bounced off his minority partner, and all of that is shaken to the core during the film's last act. Hell or High Water is the film that the overrated Coen brothers' grossly metaphorical and convoluted No Country for Old Men should have been. It is a modern American classic, a contemporary Western masterpiece for those who no longer remember cinema's most (in)famous bank robbers of long ago, and can now get the best of the past and present that the genre has to offer.
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