Hell or High Water

About halfway through David Mackenzie’s lean and introspective crime thriller, Texas Ranger Marcus Hamilton (Jeff Bridges) and his much put-upon half-Indian/half-Mexican partner Alberto Parker (Gil Birmingham) – “I’ll get to the Mexican when I’ve used up the Indian insults” Marcus avers in a moment of breathtakingly casual racism – decide to take a hands on approach to the series of bank robberies they’re investigating and stake out one of the handful of branches of the Texas Midland that hasn’t been targeted yet. During their stay at the economically depressed small town said branch caters to, Marcus and Alberto take in the delights of the most depressing motel this side of ‘Vacancy’ and a restaurant whose menu is marginally less limited than its waitress’s customer service skills. As their sojourn drags on, Hamilton playing out his string as an avoidance technique (his mandatory and unwanted retirement is imminent), they get to discussing small town life. Marcus can see a kind of dimestore poetry to it; Alberto is scathing: “Everything in the hardware store costs twice as much as Home Depot and there’s one restaurant with a rattlesnake for a waitress.”

This, more than any of the billboards advocating high-interest loans or debt management services that various characters drive past, pins down the subject Mackenzie and scripter Taylor Sheridan (‘Sicario’) are putting under a microscope. Or should I say that they’re putting it under a microscope, leaving the microscope out in the sun, sitting back with a patience and a commitment to slowburn narrative that evoke the best of 1970s American filmmaking, and letting it squirm for a while.

Here’s another line, prominently featured in the trailer, which pretty much serves as mission statement. Marcus and Alberto are in a diner the perps ate at before a robbery. Marcus takes a good-ole-boy approach to ingratiating himself with the regulars and sounding them out: “How long y’ been living here?” “Long enough,” one of them replies, “to see a bank get robbed that’s been robbin’ me for thirty years.”

Some bank heist movies key into the Robin Hood-style romanticism of the outlaw lifestyle (‘Bonnie and Clyde’), some are studies in logistics and fall-out (‘Heat’), some use the heist as a jumping off point for revelations and political machinations (‘The Bank Job’) and some are laconically subversive (‘Thunderbolt and Lightfoot’). Now there’s a thought: watch ‘High or High Water’ on a double-bill fronted by ‘Thunderbolt and Lightfoot’: Bridges at the start of his career playing the charismatic wiseass, and Bridges in the maturity of his career, giving a definitive study of ageing, regret and almost sealed-off vulnerability. But I digress. ‘Hell or High Water’ is a bank heist movie where the mechanics of the heist are secondary (though still well-observed: the burial of the various getaway cars is an inspired touch) to the particular branches that get robbed.

It’s no spoiler to introduce our two stick-up merchants: brothers Toby (Chris Pine) and Tanner (Ben Foster) Howard. Toby’s divorced, little contact with his two children and not much going for him. Tanner’s been in and out of jail his entire adult life, no meaningful relationship, no future, and quite frankly even fucking less going for him. Hence his willingness to partner up with his bro for a series of heists engineered to steal small but untraceable sums, the aim being a pot of money that satisfies the bank who are a week away from foreclosing on their late mother’s farmstead, a property that is apparently a source of oil. Toby’s intent is to regain ownership of the land and leave it in trust to his children – to do, in essence, one good thing in a life otherwise defined by failure. Tanner? Well, he just seems to enjoy it.

The brothers have a system worked out: rob bank, hit casino, convert stolen money into chips, play just enough to earn a bit more or lose within acceptable levels, then cash in said chips for a cheque made out to the very bank they fucked over. Crime with a sense of irony. What’s not to love?

What makes ‘Hell or High Water’ fascinating is that neither Toby or Tanner actually stand to make anything out of the heists beyond being able to buy back their birthright. Which is an abject shithole, oil or no oil. Toby wants to shore up the future for his offspring whom he’d previously failed. Toby, as another character says of him, could make enough from a single heist to park a brand-new pick-up truck and a jet-ski in front of his house for no other reason than to spend it all so that he has to go out and steal more money.

In this respect, although the aesthetics of small town Americana are writ large, ‘Hell or High Water’ can be readily identified as the work of a British director. This is the heist movie for the age of austerity. You could transpose the whole thing to the septic sceptred isle relatively easily. Bridges would be the Little England bigot not quite ready to retire to the Costa del Sol (and therefore be a significantly interesting character), and the banks would be, well, the banks.

But maybe I’m stretching a point. As much as ‘Hell or High Water’ seems like a parable for austerity Britain, it’s also chillingly easy to read it as prescient of an America under Trump. A scene where Toby and Tanner deal with armed resistance at a bank swiftly and decisively only to escape getting shot to pieces by a hare’s breadth as they hotfoot it outside and a bunch of townsfolk make like it’s the Alamo all over again is as effective a commentary on open-carrying as you’re likely to see. It’s a scene that evokes the intervention of the pick-up driving fascist rednecks that utterly and irreversibly changes everything in the final season of ‘Breaking Bad’. It’s a scene that culminates in said townsfolk changing their minds the moment the odds are recalibrated. And it’s a scene that entirely hinges on the American love affair with weaponry.

Yet there’s nothing gung-ho about the film. Sure, it depicts machismo; Mackenzie and Sheridan are acutely aware of how men behave around each other – not to mention how abjectly they regard women. (Arguably only Toby transcends this failing, but to talk about the dynamics of a scene towards the very end of the film would be to indulge in a spoiler too far.) Everything – tone, pace, performances, visuals – testifies to how much thought and consideration went into ‘Hell or High Water’. Even a sudden lurch into ‘High Sierra’ territory pays off in a manner that is more evocative of Tommy Lee Jones’s contemporary anti-western ‘The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada’ – a film I’d have no hesitation in ranking this one alongside.

The Men Who Stare at Goats

Posted as part of an intermittent series of espionage-related cinema leading up to the release of the new James Bond film ‘Skyfall’ later this year


I’d had it on good authority that ‘The Men Who Stare at Goats’ was a POS. Despite this, I neglected to delete it from my rental list. So when it turned up last week, my rationale was something like this: aww, hell, it stars George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges and Kevin Spacey, and at a pinch I can feature it as part of my intermittent series of espionage-related cinema, surely it’s worth a watch.

Readers, I watched it.

POS is perhaps a tad harsh – there are a couple of bona fide laugh out loud moments – but to watch Grant Heslov’s film is ultimately to watch a terrific cast squander themselves as a brilliant concept is simply frittered away.

For this reason, we won’t dwell on it too long. Synopsis time: journo Bob Wilton (McGregor) does a human interest piece on bonkers ex-soldier Gus Lacey (Stephen Root) who reminisces about his time with Lyn Cassady (Clooney) in a psychic military unit led by quasi-hippie Bill Django (Bridges). Initially sceptical, Wilton files the story then heads to Iraq to prove himself as a front-line reporter after the breakdown of his marriage. It’s here he bumps into Cassady, who recounts the story of Django’s unit as the pair head across country so Cassady can complete some mysterious mission.


Herein my first problem with the film. Point of view and lead character duties skip from Wilton to Cassady to Django with such skittish abandon that I couldn’t get a handle on whether Heslov and scripter Peter Straughan were being arbitrary, indecisive, or full-on going for an anti-narrative. The tone, too, veers from genuinely amusing to trying-too-hard to actually-quite-mean-spirited, seemingly on a whim.

Round at the halfway mark, the film coheres into the Wilton and Cassady road show, but it’s delivered all its satirical barbs by this point and only one inspired but narratively redundant scene involving Robert Patrick as the head of a US security who gets into a firefight with a different US security force which he happily blames on the Iraqis emerges as memorable. The firefight, incidentally, is over superiority in a queue at a petrol station.

Based on a non-fiction work by Jon Ronson, and opening with the irresistible credit “more of this is true than you would believe”, ‘The Men Who Stare at Goats’ starts out knee-deep in potential but never fully gets to grips with the off-the-wall political satire the concept demands. Instead we get a smorgasbord of contrived and often unfunny in-jokes, mostly referencing the casts’ previous work. McGregor seems to have been cast purely as the butt of the joke every time one of the psychic irregulars refers to himself as a Jedi warrior.

Heslov, making his feature debut, doesn’t stamp a strong enough visual or satirical signature on the material, particularly when the finale cries out for the demented visual flair of a David Lynch or an Alejandro Jodorowsky. What Heslov manages is ninety minutes of moderate amusement, when Ronson’s book could easily have lit the fuse on a two-hour delirious headfuck.

True Grit

Permit me to hawk up a loogie and spit on an icon.

Ready? Got your burning torches lit? Rounded up a posse? Tar and feathers to hand? Rail on order to run me out of town on?

Okay, here goes: I’m not keen on John Wayne.

There: I said it.

I’m not keen on him because of his swaggering self-satisfaction, I’m not keen on him because of his right wing agenda (this is, after all, the guy who starred in and co-directed a pro-Vietnam movie), and I’m not keen on him because, frankly, the guy couldn’t act. In fact, I’ll go as far as saying that there are plenty of John Wayne performances which are downright embarrassing.

In Henry Hathaway’s ‘True Grit’, the sight of The Duke as Rooster Cogburn riding full pelt into a gunfight, reins clamped between his teeth, pistols in both hands, is so obviously a striving for macho iconography that it’s almost laughable. In the Coen Brothers’ spot-on remake, the sight of Jeff Bridges doing exactly the same thing is a thrilling piece of cinema: from the world-weariness with which he lifts the reins and bites down on them, to the blink-and-you-miss-it hint of desperation, to the audacity of his Light Brigade-style charge against superior numbers, this moment alone would probably be enough to make me dance on the saloon roof declaring the film the best western since ‘Unforgiven’.

Shout it loud, then, that the rest of ‘True Grit’ is just as good. Going back to the morality (and almost comedic absurdity) of Charles Portis’s novel, the Coens get it intuitively right in every aspect that Hathaway got it wrong. Gone the wooden characterisation of LaBoeuf by Glen Campbell; in its place, a fine and entertainingly self-deprecating supporting performance courtesy of Matt Damon. Gone the missing-the-point casting of then 22-year old Kim Darby as the 14-year old narrator and all-too-young heroine Mattie Ross; in its place a simply remarkable turn from Hailee Steinfeld, authentically 14 at the time of shooting, and yet inhabiting the skin of her character with a depth of nuance and a genuine screen presence that many seasoned performers three times her age would weep to achieve.

I’m still unsure, a month after I saw the film (yeah, I’m getting tardy with my reviews lately; blame it on the novel!), who I’m more impressed by: Bridges, Damon or Steinfeld. Perhaps, ultimately, Steinfeld. We all know Bridges is a great actor, and the role of Rooster Cogburn allows him to cut loose and have a little fun, while still anchoring things with an ornery gravitas. Damon was always more than just a pretty-boy leading man, and here he (pardon the pun) earns his spurs with an often hilarious portrayal of a self-important windbag.

But it’s Steinfeld who comes out of nowhere and provides the emotional core of every scene she’s in – which is basically the whole movie! That she came away empty-handed on Oscar night is a crime.

The bad guys of ‘True Grit’ do equally sterling work, with Josh Brolin on typically excellent form (after this and his breakout performance in ‘No Country for Old Men’, here’s hoping he becomes a Coens regular) and Barry Pepper bringing a gimlet-eyed depiction of career villainy to the table.

Roger Deakins, back in the fold after scheduling conflicts didn’t allow him to lens ‘Burn After Reading’, conjures a vision of the old west that is at once classically elegant, grubbily unromantic and tinged with the melancholy of reminiscence – this latter particularly appropriate as it is Mattie in middle age who recounts the story, a device that culminates in a poignant final scene.

In opting not to remake Hathaway’s film, but strip things back to the original novel, the Coen Brothers have finally given Charles Portis’s ‘True Grit’ the big screen incarnation it deserves.

Summer of the superhero (1): Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk

Empire magazine has this to say about 'Iron Man':

"[It] is an origin story is more ways than one ... Origin stories are tricky things - they often feel like feature length pilots. And where is it written that comic book franchises need origin stories. Looking just beyond the genre, it didn't hurt Indiana Jones, Connery's James Bond or Captain Jack Sparrow that they arrived on our screens fully formed."

Well. What can you say to that? Nothing really, except to state the obvious:

Indiana Jones is Indiana Jones. James Bond is James Bond. Jack Sparrow is Jack Sparrow. None of them have alter egos. All superheroes, however, do have alter egos. They have to, otherwise they wouldn't be superheroes. The very point of the superhero is the concept of a secret identity. Therefore Superman is Clark Kent and Superman. Batman is Bruce Wayne and Batman. And for this work, for character motivation to be established, and for the crucial dramatic dynamic between the two halves of their personalities to function, you have to explain why Clark Kent became Superman or Bruce Wayne became Batman*.

Two effortlessly entertaining blockbusters, adding up to four and a half hours of big-screen fun, exploit the dynamic between public persona and iconic alter ego to brilliant effect.


Empire's bone of contention vis-a-vis Jon Favreau's 'Iron Man' - an odd choice of director, but by God he makes the material work! - is, actually, precisely its strong point. Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jnr, following up his storming comeback turn in 'Kiss Kiss Bang Bang' with another storming turn sure to put him right back in the A-list) is an arms manufacturer: clever, cocksure, terminally irresponsible, Downey plays him like a child revelling in the sheer fun of playing soldiers ... except imagine a child who's grown up to earn unprecedented wealth, drive an Audi R8 and hang out with centrefolds.

Then, in the film's most compelling section, he learns a swift lesson on the nature of responsibility when he's captured by terrorists and forced to build a weapon they can deploy against Stark's best customers (the United States military). Stark responds by creating an armoured (and armour-plated) exoskeleton which also has the capacity for flight, and blasts his way to freedom. Returning to America, he realises that (a) some dodgy corporate dealings within the company have seen arms shipments sold to the selfsame terrorists who imprisoned him; and (b) his ad hoc invention is possibly the greatest weapon he's yet created. Rather than let it become public (or even shareholder) knowledge, he keeps it under wraps ... and re-invents himself as Iron Man.

'Iron Man' isn't quite a straight-up classic of its kind (all its best scenes are in the first half; the climatic smack-down is nothing compared to Stark's escape an hour beforehand), but it works because the script pays attention to who Stark is, who he becomes and why. And because Favreau draws good performances out of quality actors: Downey Jnr owns the role the way Johnny Depp makes Jack Sparrow completely and utterly his own; Gwyneth Paltrow is radiant as Stark's Miss Moneypenny-style PA, 'Pepper' Potts - there's a palpable chemistry in their scenes together; and Jeff Bridges adds a measured amount of gravitas as the Machiavellian Obadiah Stone.

Canny casting is the key, also, to Louis Letterier's 'The Incredible Hulk'. Edward Norton plays Bruce Banner, a scientist seeking a cure to the gamma poisoning that provokes his transformation into something big, green and afflicted by serious anger management issues every time something gets his goat. Genius casting! Edward Norton has always excelled at playing schizophrenic characters. Remember 'Primal Fear', Norton's rivetting performance making an otherwise by-the-numbers courtroom yawnfest compelling whenever he was on screen? Or how about 'Fight Club'? Norton wears the hounded, world-weary character of Banner like a ragged old coat. Liv Tyler, as Dr Betty Ross, provides the human element, much as Paltrow does in Iron Man; while William Hurt and Tim Roth are value for money in fleshed-out, well-considered supporting roles.

'The Incredible Hulk' isn't an origin story per se, but delivers the Banner/Hulk backstory with admirable speed and efficiency during the opening credits sequence. This achieves two objectives: it allows us to (a) disregard the earlier movie, Ang Lee's 'Hulk' - at best, a noble failure - and (b) narratively speaking, cut to the chase. For 'The Incredible Hulk' is essentially a chase movie. Banner wants a cure so he can live a normal life; the military want Banner so they can use what's inside him to create an army of 'super-soldiers'. No quarter is asked or given. The stakes are raised when General Ross (Hurt) uses fanatical soldier Emil Blonsky (Roth) as a guinea pig in an attempt to engineer another creature with the Hulk's physical prowess. But power corrupts, Blonsky is consumed by his dark side, and the Abomination is born.

Ang Lee's take on the Hulk was misconceived: a bright green blob that bounced around like a screensaver on crack. Letterier's is the real deal: muscled, veiny, dark green to the point of shadowy, and - crucially - fucking angry. Again, it isn't without flaws. As with 'Iron Man', the denouement is overly protracted, but a cracking script and genuine chemistry between the characters lift it well above the usual standard of comic book movies. Nifty last-minute vignettes link the two movies (although you'll need to stay until after the end credits with 'Iron Man') and point towards an upcoming Avenger adaptation.

In the meantime, however, there's Christopher Nolan's 'The Dark Knight' and Guillermo del Toro's 'Hellboy II: the Golden Army' to look forward to, hugely anticipated sequels to two of my favourite comic book adaptations, both reuniting original cast and original director.

It's gonna be a good summer!


*Subject of which: 'Batman Begins', which is arguably the best comic book adaptation yet produced, is an origin story all the way down the line - and it took a defibrilator to waning heartbeat of a near-dead franchise.