Glenn Heath Jr.’s review published on Letterboxd:
There's something interesting going on here, but I'm still struggling to pinpoint what that is exactly. It's a bleak, no-nonsense, bruising drama that, like LAWLESS, is multiple movies in one competing for attention. But the genre tensions more or less live within the same tonal register.
Hillcoat creates a mosaic of warnings, escalations, unjustified violence committed to prove a point. For what? Our post-Iraq world is essentially a series of dead-ends, meager betrayals, shallow alliances between "brothers-in-arms." I'm fascinated by the film's wilting sense of camaraderie, how unsensational it all feels. How lives (and limbs) are casually decimated for no other reason than to create distractions from a razor thin story. There once was a code, but it's all but evaporated.
An amazing all-star cast playing selfish, one-dimensional shells of former people who may have been complex in another time. Each is hoping that the culmination of their actions will not lead them to a pre-ordained path. But of course they end up exactly where we would expect. In hindsight, this is more of a film noir than it is an action/heist/cop movie. Fatalism coated in red dye.