There are several bank robbery scenes in “Hell or High Water,” but none is quite the same as the first. That’s because we don’t yet know the men behind the black masks, who terrorize an old lady to steal money from the banks drawer. To us, they’re no more than criminals. This is a brilliant way to start a film about doing the wrong thing for the right reasons, and the guilt that comes with that.

That’s exactly what robber Toby Howard (Chris Pine) fears, and that’s exactly what his brother and partner-in-crime Tanner Howard (Benner Foster) has resigned himself to: being no more than a criminal.

Once the black masks are taken off, the reasoning behind the bank robberies is revealed. They’re trying to pay off the mortgage on the ranch of their recently-deceased mother with small-time bank robberies.

The film moves slowly, which makes the few quick, action packed robberies remain intense as they escalate in danger. When the brothers walk into a bank, they are playing a part in order to maximally intimidate everyone in the bank. The timbre in their voices say that they’re insane and violent, rather than just looking for money.

The important characters come in twos in “Hell or High Water.” Toby and Tanner rob banks together, but their motivations are divorced: Toby does it for his two sons’ future, while Tanner does it for the thrill. Tanner, an ex-con who killed the pair’s abusive father, spends much of the film annoying Toby with his eccentricity and questionable morals, and Toby, recently divorced and trying to buy the ranch for his sons, spends much of the film brooding. Neither character could really ever really stand alone: their one and a half dimensions each combine to make a three dimensional pair.

The second pair, Marcus Hamilton (Jeff Bridges) and his partner Alberto Parker (Gil Birmingham), cops who are chasing the brothers through West Texas, are unbalanced in personality. Marcus is basically Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) in the Coen Brothers’ 2007 “No Country for Old Men,” a grizzled old cop thirsting for one last bout of excitement before retirement, with an extra helping of casual racism. The apparent blossoming friendship between Hamilton and Parker never really becomes believable, but Hamilton is pretty compelling all on his own–turns out Jeff Bridges does the cliché almost as well as Tommy Lee Jones did.

The comparisons to “No Country” don’t stop there. West Texas is portrayed, again, as a land of mythical immensity, a place that has more to do with the old South than the twenty-first century. But no country portrays the encroaching modern world through cold-blooded killer Z, while “Hell or High Water” does the same with the cold interior of banks, and the blinding neon of casinos.