The 2016 summer movie season has been disappointing, especially if you discount some of the more solid animated family films. The spate of sequels and reboots certainly left a lot to be desired. Suicide Squad ended up as not much more than a two-hour exercise in excessive music licensing. Ghostbusters was decent but unable to rise above toxic pre-release criticisms and stalled out at the box office. For adults though, there were few bright spots. The Nice Guys and Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping provided some R-rated laughs, but, again, raise your hand if you saw either. The Shallows is a tight thriller that's likely to become a HBO staple. There's a takeaway from the last few months of hype: Chris Pine was in a fantastic movie and it didn't involve Starfleet. It's called Hell or High Water, and you should make it your business to catch it if it's playing at a theater near you.

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Set in very dusty Texas (though shot, and shot incredibly well, in New Mexico), in a series of fewer-than-one horse towns, the film stars Pine and Ben Foster as outlaw brothers, Toby and Tanner Howard, racing the clock to knock over a few banks. Their motives, and the cleverness of their scheme, become clear fairly early on, but it never gets boring, especially when things start to go horribly wrong and the shots start firing.

Pine is revelatory as Toby, and it's great to see him leave the brash type role he's done well in three Star Treks to Foster (one of his generation's best character actors and arguably the most talented member to emerge from the Disney Channel pipeline) and give his interpretation of the criminal-with-a-soft-side trope while at the same time playing a rake who's responsible for everything that goes wrong. Pine's Toby is a man of purpose and principal, but he's also a ball of rage as witnessed by an unspoken threat to a loan officer or an outburst at a gas station that's played for the whoa-shit-factor and then for laughs when Foster reacts. The two have an easy, lived-in chemistry, and despite not resembling each other all too much, they're perfectly matched as brothers. There's an underlying sadness to their interactions and mission as a whole (an excellent family melodrama exists in a different edit), but both actors acquit themselves well, helped by great writing.

CBS Films

The performance most likely to stick with you, however, is Jeff Bridges as the grizzled Texas Ranger in hot pursuit of the Howard boys. Marcus Hamilton is an instantly iconic Jeff Bridges character—half True Grit's Rooster Cogburn, half Crazy Heart's Bad Blake—and he hasn't been this good in years. It's a gregarious, soulful performance, a veteran actor playing a veteran lawman and you believe every part of it—even the clichés go down as smoothly as a Shiner Bock. If you squint, the character could be Jeff Lebowski if he never tried pot and went straight back in the '70s.

If you squint, Jeff Bridges' Marcus Hamilton could be Jeff Lebowski if he never tried pot and went straight back in the '70s.

The repartee between Hamilton and his half-Mexican, half-Comanche partner Alberto Parker (Gil Birmingham, the First Nations actor familiar to anyone with a Netflix account) is some of the film's best. Their relationship is established from their first scene together: These two have worked with each other for years and respect each other as cops and as men, even if that's shown through insults about alcoholism and Alzheimer's. If the characters weren't named, you'd think they were Dead and Pan. If a cable network wants to do a prequel series about these two, I'd be into it.

The real star of the movie though, oddly, may be its writer Taylor Sheridan. In just his second film (last year's Sicario was his debut), the former actor (he played Deputy Hale on Sons of Anarchy) has perfected his authorial voice. He's got an ear for dialogue and a knack for memorable characters—no matter how briefly they're on screen. Moreover, he possesses a thesis: how the West was lost. Yeah, crime isn't great, but neither is the bank foreclosing on your house. By means legal and illegal, everyday folks get fucked over by institutions bigger than them (a scene in which Bridges attempts to confiscate a waitress's $200 tip as evidence is especially heartrending) and there's no escaping it. Sometimes the only solution is to game the system right back. In Sicario, that meant playing by cartel rules; in Hell or High Water, it's feeding the snake its own tail. Sheridan probably isn't a seer, but Hell or High Water even finds the space to reflect on concealed-carry permitting. (Sheridan's making his directorial debut next year and it should be on everyone's most-anticipated list.)

CBS Films

Make no mistake, Hell or High Water's subtext shouldn't get you down. It's an extremely enjoyable picture with quite a few laugh lines (a Mr. Pibb burn has stuck with me). At times it's languid, content to bask in its world, like in a number of scenes where characters shoot the shit over a beer or five or interact with eye witnesses, waitresses (one waitress in particular is a standout), and hotel clerks. Other times it'll leave you covering your mouth or biting your lip. The sense that something could happen in a number of scenes will make you giddy when the release does or doesn't come. This is a movie that knows how to ratchet up tension and does it with gusto.

Sitting pretty at 98% on the Tomatometer, Hell or High Water didn't escape notice from the critics, and audiences are catching up to it as well. It grossed just under $600,000 on 32 screens its opening weekend before adding around $3 million last weekend after expanding to another 440 theaters. Hell or High Water is pulpy as hell, one of the best movies of the summer, and a dark horse awards contender for Jeff Bridges and screenwriter Taylor Sheridan. I'm jealous of you because you still get to see it for the first time.

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