'The Highwaymen' Tells Bonnie And Clyde Like You've Never Seen Before
Starring Kevin Costner, Woody Harrelson, Kathy Bates, John Carroll Lynch and Kim Dickens
Rated R
Drama
Run time: 2 hrs, 12 min
Directed by John Lee Hancock
On Netflix March 29, 2019
Any coverage of the story of Bonnie and Clyde, be it in song, show or film, does one obvious thing: shows the audience what the thieving duo was up to. Other than the fact that the chase was happening and the knowledge of how the story ends, you don’t often get to see what is happening on the law enforcement side of things. In this movie, that’s all you’re going to see.
‘The Highwaymen’ stars Costner and Harrelson as Frank Hamer and Maney Gault, two old friends and ex-Texas Rangers who have been out of the game for a while but get called back into service in order to find the two ‘kids’ who were terrorizing the United States with robberies and killings. After a stunt pulled at a prison work camp, Governor Ma Ferguson (Bates) is persuaded to call in the big guns: Rangers. An insane manhunt goes on with Hamer and Gault at the forefront. They map out their path, trying to get one step ahead and figure out where this trouble-starting duo is going next.
Sometimes, there’s a bit of fatigue that comes with a based-on-a-true-story films, and this one is able to stay mostly immune to it, though the run time of more than two hours is a bit much. Despite knowing how this story inevitably ends, getting this perspective on the tale breathes new life into what has become all but an American myth. Costner and Harrelson do a fantastic job, and the chemistry is worn in, and it’s extremely easy to believe these guys have gone through a lot together (and I was shocked to see this was the first time the two actors had really shared the screen).
It’s so easy to exaggerate these true story tales in order to make history a little more exciting, but this feels pretty true to the basics. This isn’t sensational storytelling; it’s just the other side of the coin. There’s nothing necessarily exciting about two men always showing up just a bit too late to catch their criminals, but there’s something about these guys that makes you hang in until the end. Especially with this being a streaming flick, it’s absolutely worth a watch.