10 Greatest Westerns Of The 21st Century

Hell or High Water shares a lot of its DNA with No Country For Old Men, and a fair amount with the criminally under watched and underrated Jim Mickle thriller Cold In July. It’s a movie about the bonds of brotherhood, about making the wrong choices for the right reasons, and above all, about sticking it to the banks.

Essentially taking one of the Western genre’s most clichéd narrative types, the bank robbery, and spinning it on its head in a contemporary setting, Hell or High Water feels particularly resonant in our financially unstable present day. The Tanner brothers serve as today’s answer to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, two outlaw bank robbers who actually come off seeming a lot nobler in their intentions than the lawmen pursuing them.

Ben Foster is a brutish yet likable figure here - a far cry from his sleek, flamboyant gunslinger from 3:10 to Yuma – while Jeff Bridges is at his guttural best. But it is Chris Pine who serves as the biggest surprise in Hell or High Water. As a performer who is consistently the most boring part of every movie he appears in, it is shocking that he fits so perfectly into the mould of a sympathetic outlaw and lapsed family man.

Like the brothers at its centre, Hell or High Water is seemingly callous at first, but look a little deeper and there’s a sensitive core to David McKenzie’s award-winning crime drama.