The first thing you need to know about the Netflix original film The Highwaymen is that it’s not a biopic of the country supergroup that featured Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, and Kris Kristofferson (though it’s a little surprising that one of those hasn’t happened yet for them, right?), or a biopic of the unrelated folk music act from the 1960s.
But this new movie is still based on fact: It’s about Frank Hamer and Maney Gault, real-life Texas Rangers who were hired to apprehend (really, track and kill) the Depression-era celebrity bank-robbers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Darrow. Basically, it’s the law-enforcement side of the classic 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde, with the famous outlaws observed from a stoic distance. Here, we attempt to answer all your pressing questions.
Who is in The Highwaymen?
Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson play Hamer and Gault, respectively. They spend a lot of time in a car together, though it saddens us to report that the resemblance to True Detective is mostly superficial. Harrelson, by virtue of his delightful, increasingly masticating persona, has a little more fun with his role; Costner is playing things super-straight, grimacing and glowering at the mindless throng who idolize Bonnie and Clyde for sticking it to the man (even though, as Costner’s character endlessly points out to plenty of naïve young dummies desperate for the guidance of a good stern lecture, they are also heedless murderers).
But who plays Bonnie and Clyde?
Emily Brobst and Edward Bossert, who are both professional stunt performers. This isn’t an action thriller, per se, but Bonnie and Clyde have a ghostlike presence; their faces are barely glimpsed until the second half, and even then, still only briefly. It’s hard to tell if this is intended to nod at the way their reputation preceded them toward the end of their bank-robbing career, or if the movie is trying to make them seem scarier, but only winds up making them seem more mythological.
Who made it?
The director is John Lee Hancock. Hancock started out as a screenwriter, and wrote a couple of Clint Eastwood’s ’90s movies, including A Perfect World, starring Kevin Costner (it’s one of Costner’s best performances, in fact). As a director, Hancock briefly served as sort of a Disney version of Eastwood, sharing Eastwood’s late-career interest in different bits of Americana and history. For Disney, he made the costly boondoggle The Alamoand, more successfully, Saving Mr. Banks, a behind-the-scenes look at Mary Poppins and Walt Disney himself. Outside of Disney, he directed the risible Oscar nominee The Blind Side, and the thornier, more interesting McDonald’s origin story The Founder. The Highwaymen fits right into his wheelhouse, for better and for worse.
Is there a trailer?
Of course! It advertises something a bit punchier and snappier than what this movie really is, but have at it:
How and when can you see it?
Technically speaking, The Highwaymen is out! As they sometimes do with their higher-profile releases, Netflix gave this movie a brief theatrical run starting on March 15th, two weeks ahead of its debut on the streaming service. These releases are rarely especially wide, not least because most of the major theater chains refuse to show movies without at least a 90-day window (that is, 90 days between the movie’s theatrical debut and its in-home release). In Manhattan, for example, one of the biggest moviegoing cities in the United States, The Highwaymen is playing on exactly one screen.
So, how is it?
A bit workmanlike, to be honest. It’s hard to get around the fact that, in this telling, Hamer and Gauilt simply aren’t as interesting as the Bonnie and Clyde played by Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in the 1967 film. It’s not a fair comparison, but it’s one the movie very much invites by its very existence. As a 132-minute procedural, the movie feels like a trudge; the tracking work on display is methodical and, again, heavy on stern mini-lectures about how dangerous it is to romanticize these outlaws.
Though the movie has a little weary, Eastwoodian fun with the lead characters’ advanced age—Costner’s Hamer isn’t cut out for even a relatively low-stakes foot pursuit, and Harrelson’s Gault has to keep stopping to urinate—it ultimately doesn’t say much about it except that these old-timers can still get the job done. There’s none of the ambiguity of Hancock’s The Founder (even in that film, he didn’t always feel comfortable with it). Costner found some late-career success with a History Channel miniseries; The Highwaymen sometimes feels like one of those, in condensed but still not exactly concise form.
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