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Created Aug 23, 2016 10:39PM PST • Edited Nov 09, 2017 12:08PM PST

1. Quality

2. Summary

   Good 3.0

   Hell or High Water arrived with high expectations, which it didn’t meet. So this Rangers and robbers story set in today’s Texas gets scored a bit lower than it otherwise might have. That said, Jeff Bridges and Chris Pine are great moviestars. Figure in a fitfully interesting story, and the movie has plenty to recommend it.

   That includes a timely and well-crafted tale about sympathetic robbers, their well thought-out plan and the inevitable bloodshed it triggers. Sadly, the story mostly putters along until it kind of peters out, trades in gratuitous racism, and never quite reaches hell or high water. High water? It mostly treads lukewarm water.

4. Acting

   Very Good 3.5

   Jeff Bridges is never less than great. Now we get to encounter him in senior citizen roles, here as a crusty Texas Ranger facing retirement. His laconic bearing is ideal, making a stricken look all the more striking.

   Gil Birmingham grounds the movie as his Ranger partner and the butt of his racist teasing. Birmingham has an innate likability and level headedness.

   Chris Pine & Ben Foster play hard-luck brothers who take to robbing banks.

   • Pine plays the conflicted one, a scruffy role that the pretty-boy actor handles well. It’s quite a contrast to the heroes he played earlier this year in Star Trek Beyond and The Finest Hours.
   • Foster plays his stock sleazebag role.

   Bit Players

   • Margaret Bowman pretty near stole the movie as a tough talking waitress at the T-bone Restaurant. “What don’t you want?!”
   • Katy Mixon as a yearning waitress
   • Dale Dickey as an unfortunate bank teller
   • Taylor Sheridan – the movie’s screenwriter – as a cowboy

5. Male Stars Great 4.0

6. Female Stars Good 3.0

7. Female Costars Very Good 3.5

8. Male Costars Very Good 3.5

10. Film

    Good 3.0

    The Texas milieu is the most interesting aspect of Hell or High Water, complete with a bank full of gun carrying customers who don’t take kindly to being robbed.

    OTOH, the overt racism voiced by a Ranger to his partner strikes a phony note in 2016. The odds that this happens in real life are less than the odds that its inclusion tickles the professional critics who are raving about the film. Coastal elites love mid-American movies that make them feel superior to mid-Americans.

11. Direction Very Good 3.5

12. Play Good 3.0

13. Music Good 3.0

14. Visuals Very Good 3.5
15. Content

16. Edge

    Risqué 2.4

17. Sex Titillating 1.9

18. Violence Brutal 2.6

19. Rudeness Profane 2.7

21. Reality

    Glib 1.3

22. Circumstantial Glib 1.9

23. Biological Natural 1.0

24. Physical Natural 1.0