Chris Pine and Ben Foster think banks are bad in a new Hell Or High Water trailer
Yesterday, a new trailer for the indulgent and nostalgic Western Magnificent Seven, based on a movie from 1960 based on a movie from 1954, dropped. Today, the modern Western Hell Or High Water fired back with a new trailer featuring its own band of outlaw brothers. In this case, though, they’re literally brothers. And they’re not cowboys so much as down-on-their-luck antiheroes going up against the modern-day bandits at the banks. Chris Pine plays Toby, a divorced father who wants a better life for his children, and Ben Foster stars as his ex-convict brother; faced with the foreclosure of their mother’s West Texas farm, they take justice into their own hands and rob the bank that robbed them. Or maybe they just wanted to make a withdrawal without having to bother with pesky ATM fees. In any case, two West Texas Rangers played by Gil Birmingham and Jeff Bridges are hot on their trail.
The new trailer screams “banks are bad!” in an even more overt way than the first, and by the end, you might want to rob a bank yourself. Other than the dusty, sprawling American Southwest landscapes and cowboy hats, the other thing this trailer has in common with Magnificent Seven’s is a noticeable lack of women from the narrative. There’s an obligatory straight-talking diner waitress, but it’s unclear what her role in the story is based on this trailer. (The movie was written by Taylor Sheridan though, and he created the brilliant female antihero at the center of Sicario.) Hell Or High Water premiered at Cannes earlier this year to positive reviews; The A.V. Club’s own Mike D’Angelo wrote that “it’s a typical cops-and-robbers story—the kind that has you rooting for both sides” that ultimately “plays out in unexpected ways.” The trailer has one huge thing going for it: extremely on-point mustaches.
Pine and Foster previously starred together in The Finest Hours. Formerly titled Comancheria, Hell Or High Water is set to release on August 19, but will be available in select cities on August 12.