One of the things I’ve always found interesting about Taylor Sheridan is that while the TV hitmaker’s small-screen dramas like Yellowstone can be super-divisive, with both passionate defenders and fierce critics who refuse to give his work any praise whatsoever, his feature films are an altogether different story. The movies that he’s written — including pulse-pounding thrillers like Wind River, Sicario, and Hell or High Water — certainly share many similarities with his TV dramas, like a focus on rugged individualism, the American frontier, and hyper-masculine characters.
For some reason, though, and maybe it’s just me, Sheridan’s features tend to be especially riveting and filled with the kind of satisfying, pulse-pounding action you don’t always get from his shows. The border shootout in the first Sicario movie. The standoff outside the bad guy’s trailer in Wind River. There are tons of scenes like those — and Hell or High Water, a modern-day Western about two bank-robbing brothers, is an especially fitting example of what I’m talking about.
The movie, which also stars Jeff Bridges as a relentless Texas Ranger who hunts the brothers down, just got added to Paramount+ in recent days and is already listed as one of the streamer’s trending dramas. Its 97% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes, based on almost 300 reviews, is also the best such score for one of Sheridan’s movies, if I’m not mistaken. And Hell or High Water‘s solid writing, deliberate pacing, beautiful cinematography, and epic showdown sequences more than justify the love from critics.
What it’s about: Set in the economically struggling landscape of West Texas, the film explores the desperate attempts of two brothers (played by Chris Pine and Ben Foster) to save their family farm from foreclosure. “I’ve been poor my whole life,” Pine’s Toby Howard laments at one point, during a dramatic confrontation that also happens to be the best scene in the film. “So were my parents, their parents before them. It’s like a disease passing from generation to generation, becomes a sickness, that’s what it is. Infects every person you know.”
Stories about crime and the hardscrabble lives of the downtrodden are among Sheridan’s favorite hooks on which to hang his stories. His works, such as this movie as well as Yellowstone when it was at its peak, reflect not only his affinity for the Western genre but his ability to reimagine it in a contemporary setting. And in Hell or High Water, which I would emphatically argue ranks among Sheridan’s best-ever work, there’s a timelessness in the movie’s tension between economic desperation and moral ambiguity that makes it a great watch.
The brothers are essentially noble-minded bandits who set out to rob from the bank that they decide has been robbing from them for too long, a spree that eventually has deadly consequences.
Put it this way: With its powerful performances, intense action, and thought-provoking, the movie’s arrival on Paramount+ more than makes up for the super-disappointing final season of Yellowstone. It’s too bad that the guy who wrote the former was nowhere to be found for the latter.
