The Highwaymen

When Netflix first started bugging me to watch The Highwaymen, I wasn’t much interested. I saw Arthur Penn’s Bonny and Clyde when it came out in 1967, once, and found the subject inherently over-conducive to allegorical treatment and hence vulnerable to faddish propaganda exploitation. Which was certainly the case with the ’67 movie, starring two great beauties of the day, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, and capitalizing on the rapidly rising resentment of police (i.e., pigs), the sex appeal of anarchic youth rebellion against authority, and a newly chic stylistic lingering over scenes of cinematic violence — thanks to movie pioneer Sam Peckinpah’s daring slo-mo, extreme closeups, bloody montages in driving stereo sound, and unprecedentedly graphic bullet strikes and arterial spray, etc. 

The net effect of Bonny and Clyde was, finally, political. The concluding scene was the most cold-blooded display of sanctioned police brutality yet filmed in Hollywood. A long row of faceless, concealed gunmen exterminating the two misunderstood young victims of society we had grown fond of over two hours, oftentimes funny and always charismatic in spite of their savagery when cornered and lack of remorse afterwards. They were rock stars, doing what rock star gangsters do, and the pigs who murdered them were a political prophecy about to be fulfilled in the streets at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.

Following this icon of American cinema history, came The Highwaymen — just 52 years later —  claiming to be the untold real story of the men who tracked down and killed Bonny and Clyde. You know, a look at the killers hiding in the shrubbery as shown in the clip up top. One of the two protagonists was the Texas Ranger named Hamer mocked in the movie trailer above. He was there at the end, though not as a Texas Ranger and not as anyone who was ever comically photographed by Bonny and Clyde. That’s the kind of correction this new movie seeks to provide, along with a moving subtext of just how thin the barrier between banality and barbarism can be and the costs of guarding the gates against chaos. 

The men who brought down Bonny and Clyde had been Texas Rangers at one time, instrumental in the takedown of the Mexican gangs supporting Pancho Villa, the Medellin cartel of the day, and they had done plenty of killing on behalf of the people they were sworn to protect. Now, in the time of bank-robbing tommy-gun gangsters, they were old men, retired and at peace, conscripted to do the one thing everyone knew but couldn’t say needed to be done: kill Bonny and Clyde wherever their spree wound up taking them. They couldn’t be arrested. Every roadblock ended with dead police officers. So the governor of Texas, who had recently disbanded the Texas Rangers because under her stewardship they were no longer needed, got desperate enough to ask the best, meaning the most bloodied, of  them to save the day, undercover and mostly uncredentialed. They were hired only to protect “the highway,” hence the title of the film.

Here’s what the IMDb metacritics thought:

The highlights are proof of the critic’s trick of ‘damning with faint praise.’

Like saying to those trying to guess quality, “We had to watch. You don’t.”

You probably do have to watch this though. We watched it on Easter Sunday, when there was nothing else on.

The two old men are played in the Netflix production by Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson. We are with them throughout thousands of miles of tracking. (Until the final scene, almost all we see of the glamorous Bonny and Clyde are her red shoes and cloche at murder scenes and his dark profile behind the wheel.) They wonder if they are up to the task. They hurt physically and psychologically from the violence they’ve already suffered and inflicted. Along the way, they get outsmarted, outrun, out-driven, and outclassed by the very real pop stardom of two ice-cold killers cutting bloody swaths across half the country. They run out of room to chase them in Texas. They break their orders and leave the state in pursuit. They will not stop. We in the audience come to like and respect them, root for them suspensefully, although we already know how it ends. Except for a few critical details overlooked in the Dunaway/Beatty version.

Truth to tell, there’s a lot of nothing happening here a lot of the time, but Costner and Harrelson are more engaging in these roles than either has been in a long time. The viewer winds up in their shoes eventually. You can’t go on and you can’t just walk away. There’s something important that has to be done and there’s nobody else up to the job. The young FBI agents are derisive and scornful when their paths cross the first few times. But the spree takes its toll on everyone. Like young know-it-alls everywhere, and in all times, they are forced to accept that a couple old codgers are not obstacles but a necessary component of conquering real evil, which Bonny and Clyde are.

Whose side of this story is better? The metacritics are still hooked on the old pretty faces and empty platitudes of the counterculture that educated them. Some of us out here are not similarly blinded by Beatty’s smile. We can appreciate the distinctly unglamorous deliberateness of a reluctant hero and the many small signs and interactions in which that heroism glints and glows.

Watch the movie. This review has given nothing important away.