Cinemavenger

   The funniest, nastiest movie reviews anywhere.

Hell or High Water

What has four legs, is orange and white with sharp claws and a bellowing roar, and you definitely wouldn't want to run into it in the dark?

Donald Trump hate-fucking Hillary Clinton.

This stupid country.  What else can you say when a Day-Glo caricature of a 1980s New Yawk slum lord and an ice queen career politician with dark-side-of-the-moon shady ethics and the inability to properly utilize email are the "best" choices the two major parties could come up with to hold the highest office in the land?

The system - really systems (government, finance, education, healthcare) - couldn't be more broken if it'd been frozen with liquid nitrogen and dropped from the top of the Freedom Tower. 

People should be pissed off like a frat house rooftop deck and ready to get 1990s Anne Heche crazy if something doesn't change, like, right the fuck now.  But no.  The bread and circuses of colon blow reality TV and fried Twinkies at the County Fair seem to be enough to keep most everyone from caring that the 1% are ass-ramming the rest of us not because they have to . . . or even particularly want to . . . but simply because we keep letting them.

Director David "Lymie" Mackenzie did his best to tap into the river of roiling rage flowing just below the surface of all the strip malls and The Real Housewives of Wherever the Fuck with his West Texas crime drama Hell or High Water.  Unfortunately, he's British which means that while he may know a metric ton about crimes against dentistry he knows fuck all about the fixed game that is trying-to-get-ahead in modern America.

In order to save the family farm from the big, bad bankers, two alliteratively-named brothers, Toby (Chris "Captain Smirk" Pine) and Tanner (Ben "Bananas" Foster), decide to rob some big, bad banks to get the mortgage money they need.  Because Pine has to protect his good guy Star Trek image, he's the nice one, so Foster gets to be the insane, motor-mouthed, probably no stranger to meth one.

The two are pursued by a shit-you-not "only a week left until retirement" cop played by Jeff "Nash" Bridges.  That puts Hell or High Water a White Russian away from being an episode of The Dude, Texas Ranger.  Bridges' Southern drawl is so Persian leg hair thick you can't understand half the racist jokes he makes about his Native American/Mexican partner, Alberto ("Ol'" Gil Birmingham).

Hell or High Water is the kind of movie that has Pine's character explain that he can't use any of the stolen money to pay back child support for his two kids then, literally five minutes later, has him give a huge chunk of heist cash to a random waitress as a tip. 

And he doesn't even get a hummer out of the deal.  Talk about American't.

September 9, 2016