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Sep 25, 2017Janice21383 rated this title 3 out of 5 stars
Two brothers in desperate need of money; one screenplay in desperate need of revision. Hell or High Water wants to be about much more than a bank robbery (for instance, banks robbing their customers), but the middle section sags with unnecessary exposition. Yes, times in the West are not like they used to be. No need emphasize it until the audience wants to give the characters a shake and tell them to snap out of it. And looking back, the story doesn't make a lot of real world sense.* But the pace picks up when the brothers try to pull the notorious one last job. One of the joys of this film are local actors in small roles -- they're often more entertaining than the name performers, and seem to be having some goodnatured fun at their expense. *SPOILERS: the bank is trying to take the brothers' ranch, which happens to have oil on it. Why couldn't they take the geologist's report to a competing bank, or to anyone else with money? Investors ought to have been lining up, especially in this economically depressed area. And the end of the movie depends on a random judge not granting police a look into the rancher's financial records, when it's thunderingly obvious that he needed money at the time of the bank robberies, had no visible means of support, and who won big at the casino, twice, in one week. Why not, especially when the robberies resulted in three deaths, one a police officer?