Whew, now I've seen half the Academy Best Picture nominees in time for the awards show. This was the only one available to rent that I hadn't seen yet, and it's not showing in a theater near me. Fortunately, it doesn't lose much on a small screen.
In what I take to be present-day Texas, brothers Toby (Chris Pine) and Tanner (Ben Foster) commit a series of bank robberies. Although Tanner's unhinged and Toby's a rookie, they're relatively careful as robbers go; for instance, they leave the larger bills behind and take too little at any given branch for the FBI to bother investigating. Nearly retired Ranger Hamilton (Jeff Bridges) decides he'll finally see some action, setting out with dubious comrade Parker (Gil Birmingham) to track them down. The title, which gets spoken at one point, refers to an imminent deadline for the boys to make a big payment....
Might as well be specific: The money is to prevent a foreclosure on their oil-rich ranch -- by the same (fictitious) bank chain they've been robbing, poetically enough. Oh, Tanner would probably do it anyway just for the thrills, but the desperation got Toby in on it. We feel a little sorry for Toby and even, at times, Tanner, who went to prison possibly for killing their physically abusive dad, which got him kicked out of the will. Now their mom's dead after a long illness that required Toby to struggle extra. They won't even enjoy the ranch themselves much; it's going to Toby's ex and sons.
Truly, this film does not increase my desire to visit Texas, at least on the west side. We get plenty of reminders that that's where the bulk of this takes place (with a stopover at an Oklahoma casino) and that most people around there are poor. Looks as tho the bank is the true villain of the piece. Even putting aside the economics as much as I can, the vistas largely appear washed out in sepia, and the towns look about as pleasant as in 2013's Nebraska.
I hesitated to include "western" among the genre tags, since it's not nearly in the 19th century, but other sources agree that it's basically a neo-western. A running theme is that things aren't like they were in the romanticized past. Who wants a ranch anymore? Who robs banks anymore? A brief scene with literal cowboys exists only to drive home the point that they're relics.
Arguably the star of the program is Hamilton. Bridges tends to be the best part of his movies, despite what some viewers think of him as Rooster Cogburn in a truer western. Here he's remarkably sharp for an old guy, making many correct inferences about the robbers long before meeting either. He makes a lot of wisecracks about Parker's American Indian and Mexican sides, to Parker's quiet consternation, but he seems to mean it in fun and can take age jabs in turn. (Sadly, Hamilton's not the only open racist in the movie, and others aren't quite so harmless about it.) Maybe we're supposed to think of a modern subversion of the Lone Ranger and Tonto. I almost added "comedy" to the tags, but his and other humor adds up only to mild comic relief.
If the story feels a tad predictable, I assure you that it gets less so toward the end. The final scene doesn't lend itself to comparison with many other final scenes.
The gestalt is, well, a little better than average. Good enough that I can respect the decision to nominate it for Best Picture, but it sure won't win. I predict one statuette, tho I'm not sure which.
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