Mark Reviews Movies: THE HIGHWAYMEN

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 21, 2019

Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker arrived at just the right time. Newspapers were looking for shocking stories, and there was nothing more shocking than an ordinary young man and woman who had fallen in love and started a crime spree. Radio broadcasts, with news flashes interrupting whenever the duo and their gang had perpetrated another crime, were filling homes—and cars, for those who wanted to pay extra.

The Great Depression had put pitted plenty of the public against the government and financial systems, and Barrow and Parker targeted banks. To people migrating across the country in the hopes of finding some kind of work, the wide-spread rumors, turning the story of these outlaws into a contemporary Robin Hood tale, were too enticing. They had to root for them to one extent or another.

By now, the truth doesn't matter. Bonnie and Clyde, as the pair has been immortalized since they gained—and never lost—the public's attention, killed people. Everyone knew it at the time, and everyone has known it since then. No story about them has tried to cover up that fact, but despite what one famous saying declares, legends are more stubborn things than facts. The Highwaymen, which tells the story of two of the lawmen who finally brought down Bonnie and Clyde, seems to be an attempt to confront the legend with some cold, hard facts. In the process, though, it's doing its own brand of legend-making.

The result is somewhat intriguing, although never genuinely involving, as screenwriter John Fusco tries to turn a pair of retired members of the at-the-time disbanded Texas Rangers into their own kind of iconic archetype. In this case, they're the unsung and unassuming heroes, doing their duty, without any desire for fame, because they know nobody else is as suited for the job as they are.

They're confounded by the celebrity of these robbers and murderers, because they came out of a tradition in which the side of the law was celebrated—the cowboys and lawmen of the Old West, who fought for justice in a lawless land. They must have forgotten that, for every Wyatt Earp, there's a Billy the Kid, a Jesse James, a Butch Cassidy, or a Sundance Kid. Crime may only pay for a while, but it also has made people immortal.

The primary challenge, then, for Fusco and director John Lee Hancock is to make the men who would be, at best, the antagonists or, at worst, the villains of a legend into characters who can stand next to an 85-year-old cultural myth. There's some pragmatic wisdom in the filmmaker's unspoken admission that Frank Hamer (Kevin Costner) and Maney Gault (Woody Harrelson) could never rise above the mythical status of Bonnie and Clyde (played by Emily Brobst and Edward Bossert). The very fact that the lawmen's story here is exclusively tied to the criminal duo, who are only seen clearly in their final and terrified moments of life, speaks volumes about their lack of stature in the bigger picture.

For Fusco and Hancock, though, that status translates into an underdog story of sorts. Both men are past their prime and retired. Hamer tries to live a quiet life with his wife Gladys (Kim Dickens). Gault barely works while living with his daughter Jean (Kaley Wheless) and grandson Nate (Alex Elder). The families disappear completely once the men start tracking the outlaw lovers, which also seems like a tacit admission that the protagonists' stories are of little value or interest, except in their roles in the hunt.

Hamer is assigned to a "special highway assignment" first, and then he tracks down Gault, his old partner. Neither of the men is up for an old-fashioned foot chase, and they're ill-equipped compared to the feds, who have wiretaps and direct-communication radios and interstate jurisdiction. What Hamer and Gault do have, though, is decades of experience in investigative legwork and finely honed instincts.

The hunt itself is routine, as the men check out the outlaws' stomping grounds and rush to the scenes of crimes that already have been committed—always beaten there by the feds. The legend-making isn't really about that part of the story, though. It's in turning these men into underdogs and, later, ones who are haunted by their pasts, particularly a standoff with a gang—the tale of which is saved for the eve of their confrontation with Bonnie and Clyde (Those two characters, always seen from behind or from afar or obscured by the barrel of a shotgun, are only explained here, as poor kids who went wrong and now, even according to at least one friend and family member, have to be put down).

Costner and Harrelson give fine performances, as men of the past who have difficulty adjusting to the present and fear that the action that has given Gault nightmares will repeat itself again—only, this time, with more substantial firepower. The Highwaymen, though, takes far too long to arrive at this defining piece of characterization. Until that point, we're never quite certain why the filmmakers believed this particular story was worth telling, and when it arrives, we're only certain why these men have become a historical footnote.

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