John Lee Hancock's "The Highwaymen" takes on an enormously onerous task: flipping the tale of two iconic folk heroes of the 20th century who also happen to be two of the most iconic figures in modern cinema. What's worse? We already know how the story ends. In "The Highwaymen," writer John Fusco works overtime to justify what we know is coming: the state-sanctioned murder of beloved bandits Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow in an orgy of bullets. But beyond this strained effort, there isn't much more to justify the hefty 132-minute running time of this bloated biopic about the two Texas law enforcement officers who caught the crooks.
Considering the lasting cultural significance of (and many films about) the Barrow Gang, who terrorized the heartland during the Great Depression with a two-year crime spree, it's no wonder Fusco went back to the wild well of true stories for more screenplay fodder. This isn't the first time the Texas Rangers who chased down Bonnie and Clyde have been put on film, but it's the first film that tells the tale from their perspective.
Kevin Costner plays the legendary Frank Hamer, a retired Texas Ranger conscripted into duty as a highway patrolman at the height of Bonnie and Clyde's violence. Because buddy cop movies are more fun _ and dour Hamer needs a dose of comic relief _ he picks up old pal Maney Gault (Woody Harrelson) to join him on a road trip from Texas to Oklahoma to Louisiana in pursuit of the "cold-blooded killers who are more adored than movie stars." The spiteful Governor Ma Ferguson (Kathy Bates) dispatches a team of investigators to show them up, but the rangers don't need fancy radios or forensic science when they have experience and instinct.
We almost never see the faces of Bonnie and Clyde as they ride roughshod over the Texas borders and back again. We only see them in extreme long shots or out of focus as they blast patrolmen in the face with shotguns. Hancock's aesthetic choice denies their humanization, our possible identification with them. To underline the dehumanization, the characters refer to them as "animals" who "aren't human anymore." Bonnie and Clyde are an idea, a fashion craze, a graffiti message. They become media objects, symbols, trophies to be paraded through the streets in a bullet-riddled vehicle. This ghoulish film is so preoccupied with their stalking and murder it feels like watching a snuff film.
Costner plays the restrained Hamer with the kind of midcentury white male repression we've seen before, while Harrelson offers the only scraps of empathy and pushback on Hamer's quest. But by the time Maney illuminates the trauma of one of their more violent ambushes back in the day, it's well into the film's third hour. It's simply too little too late to present any viable counterargument against the film's hugely problematic assertion that brutality is (or was) effective policing.
Furthermore, while "The Highwaymen" seeks to interrogate the myth of Bonnie and Clyde and wants to rewrite the tale from a new point of view, it uses disproven facts about the events to ultimately justify _ and lionize _ the violence of the "peace officers." Seeing the story from a different perspective could have been a worthy endeavor, but this morally dubious and ultimately suspenseless film is simply not worth the time.
