Hell or High Water (15)

four stars

Dir: David Mackenzie

With: Chris Pine, Ben Foster, Jeff Bridges

Runtime: 102 minutes

HOW the western was won by Scots directors. While too early to pitch this as a book, the idea might be one to keep in mind if pictures of the calibre of David Mackenzie’s Hell or High Water keep coming.

Just a year after John Maclean delivered the lean and mean-as-a-rattlesnake Slow West, Mackenzie steps down from the train toting his equally exhilarating western. Whatever they are putting in the water of Scots directors who dare to take on American helmers in their own back yards, it is working.

On the face of it, the two pictures could not be more different. Slow West was set in Frontiers America, while Hell or High Water is very much of its post-recession/Iraq time. In Slow West, though life could be nasty, brutal and short, there was at least hope that something better might lie beyond the next squiggle on the map. In Hell or High Water, the mood is one of exhaustion and pessimism, which Mackenzie sums up with a long, slow opening shot of a car driving through a west Texas town full of boarded up shops and homes. “Three tours in Iraq,” proclaims the graffiti on one building, “but no bailout for people like us”.

Inside the car are brothers Tanner and Toby Howard (Ben Foster and Chris Pine), two not so good old boys about to go into the business of robbing banks. In an age of internet banking and contactless payments, it seems old-fashioned, bordering on quaint, to be still doing all that Bonnie and Clyde stuff. How could they possibly hope to pull this off?

One wonders that ten fold on meeting the law man who will soon stand in their way. Marcus Hamilton (Jeff Bridges) is a Texas ranger just a sniff away from retirement. There is nothing he, or his deputy Alberto (Gil Birmingham) have not seen, no trick they have not rumbled, no bad guy they have not caught eventually.

With so much stacked against the brothers, why are they so intent on going through with their plans? That is the question Mackenzie and screenwriter Taylor Sheridan (Sicario) pose and set about addressing. The answers drop on to the plate slowly, like the last drops of syrup from a jug, and at first it seems as though Mackenzie has misjudged the pace of his tale. This is, after all, a thriller about cops and bank robbers. Doesn’t he know such movies should be smash and grab rather than slow burn?

Part of the pleasure to be had from Hell or High Water is watching all concerned turn such assumptions on their heads. Mackenzie and Sheridan are going to take their time with this story, and such is the calibre of the performances, and the meaty, many layered nature of tale, they are going to take you, the audience, with them every step of the way. Even those who have early doubts that the approach is going to work (guilty as charged, sheriff) will be pleasantly, thrillingly, surprised at how Hell or High Water draws the viewer in.

Mackenzie, fresh from his success with the British prison drama Starred Up) is having a rare old tear of it at the moment. Not quite enough, perhaps, to erase all trace of the misstep that was Perfect Sense, but getting there. He is proving himself to be an actors’ director, one that talent wants to work with because they know he will show them at their best. Bridges does not need to prove anything on that score, but his performance here as the grizzled old ranger is just wonderful. True Grit eat your heart out. It is hard to choose between Pine and Foster as to who comes out on top as the best young gun actor - Foster as the protective but psychotic older brother, or Pine, a man who has convinced himself it is okay to do bad deeds in a bad world. Whoever turns out to be your hero, Hell or High Water is a helluva ride into the sunrise.

David Mackenzie talks to James Mottram in tomorrow's Herald Arts