YMMV / Hell or High Water

• Award Snub: Neither Chris Pine or Ben Foster was nominated for an Academy Award. Most fans agree that one or the other deserved it, but they're pretty split on which one.
• Genius Bonus: A half-Native badass named Parker, whose territory is the Texas panhandle? It's probably a coincidence...
• Moral Event Horizon: Tanner executing the armed customer for trying to stop them from robbing the final bank ensures he won't be getting a happy ending, and his subsequent murder of Parker definitively earns him the fatal bullet Hamilton gives him at the end.
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • The Comanche man Tanner harasses at the casino. Not only does he look and sound like a total badass, to the point where you’d expect him to beat Tanner into submission, he has some of the most poignantly significant lines in the movie, one of which becomes an Ironic Echo as Tanner’s last words.
  • The T-bone waitress:
    "I've been working here for 44 years. Ain't nobody ever ordered nothing but a T-Bone steak and baked potato. Except one time, this asshole from New York ordered a trout, back in 1987. We ain't got no goddamned trout."
• Signature Scene: Tanner fending off the entire posse chasing after him and Toby with a hail of bullets from an assault rifle.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?: A major theme is how the rich and powerful, here embodied by banks, keep the poor and impoverished down through underhanded means and essentially take whatever they want. The reason why the brothers target Texas Midlands banks specifically is because a man working for them screwed their mother over with a reverse mortgage in her final years. The idea is summed up by Alberto relating how his own people - Native Americans and Mexicans - were slowly forced out by white settlers and now the same thing is happening again but to everybody - and then points directly at a bank.
  • One could argue the movie is making a strong case about gun control. Note that every armed citizen trying to stop Toby and Tanner completely fails. One even gets killed by Tanner in the process. Then when a group of citizens are chasing them Tanner simply opens fire on them with an assault rifle and they’re completely overwhelmed. It’s only dumb luck that none of them are killed. The closest an armed citizen comes to helping stop them is when one guy lets Hamilton use his hunting rifle to shoot Tanner. Likewise an incredibly dangerous convicted felon like Tanner didn't seem to have any trouble getting access to an assault rifle. Whether it's an attempt at balance or the film accidentally undermining its own argument, there are counterpoints to this: Both brothers complain about how much harder armed bystanders make their job (which, if you recall, entails committing crimes), and the multiple laws already on the books restricting automatic weapons didn't stop Tanner from getting his hands on one anyway, even if its implied he got the rifle before serving time^note Doable if you're not a prohibited person, but it's nevertheless a very difficult and expensive process to legally acquire a full-auto firearm..

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